Zimbabwe was thrust into the global spotlight again last week for all the wrong reasons after prominent journalist Faith Zaba was arrested on charges of “undermining the authority of the president” in connection with a satirical column.
Zaba, who is the editor of the Zimbabwe Independent and one of the few women holding such senior positions in this country’s mainstream media, spent three nights in detention despite the authorities being made aware that she had been given bedrest by a doctor at the time of her arrest.
Prosecutors said she was being charged for allowing the publication of the popular Muckracker column headlined: When you become a mafia state.
The reaction from media organisations from across the world was telling.
Muthoki Mumo, the Centre to Protect Journalists Africa programme coordinator said: “This case sends the message that Zimbabwe’s President Emmerson Mnangagwa and his administration are so fragile that they are easily threatened by a critical column.”
“It is also a reminder of this government’s willingness to waste public resources by throwing journalists behind bars.”
Andrew Heslop, executive director of the World Association of Newspapers, said it was wrong to arrest journalists for scrutinising the conduct of public officials.
“Instead of arresting journalists and criminalising the profession, Zimbabwean authorities should be doing everything in their power to protect media freedom and the hard-won constitutionally guaranteed rights of the country’s media professionals,” Hislop said.
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“Satire is an essential component of a free press, and public figures — presidents included — should accept their roles expose them to greater levels of public scrutiny.
“A strong, healthy democracy should have confidence in holding a mirror to itself and the actions of its leaders.
“That is a free media’s indispensable role — and Ms Zaba should be immediately freed to continue doing it.”
The response by the two organisations is just a sample of the outrage that followed the arrest because right-thinking people found it bizarre that a journalist would be arrested for publishing satire.
Zimbabwe’s image took another battering because in today’s world the charges that Zaba is facing do not make sense. It was another piece of evidence to show that the negative publicity that the country suffers from is self-inflicted.
For a long time, Mnangagwa’s government claimed that it was different from that of his predecessor Robert Mugabe because it does not jail journalists for simply doing their work, but this has been exposed as ruse following the arrest of Zaba and another Alpha Media Holdings journalist Blessed Mhlanga on flimsy charges.
