When the much-hated Robert Mugabe was toppled by the military as Zimbabwe’s President in November 2017, there was hope that his successor would open up the democratic space and end the suffering of the country’s citizens. Indeed, Emmerson Mnangagwa projected himself as a leader who was intent on embarking on a new path.
Who would have doubted him when, on returning from South Africa, where he had been in exile for a couple of weeks, he declared that “the voice of the people is the voice of God”, and when, on his inauguration, he told his audience that “Zimbabwe is open for business”?
Now, the very same voice of the people, which in the past few months has been stridently calling on him to tackle corruption in high places and the country’s worsening economic situation, has become the voice of terrorism as far as he and his coterie in government and the ruling Zanu-PF party are concerned.
Many who have dared to speak up have had to endure stints in remand prison in recent weeks. Among the most prominent is journalist and filmmaker Hopewell Chin’ono. Some in South Africa would remember him for his reportage on Zimbabwe when he was a correspondent for eNCA many years ago.
Chin’ono – an alumnus of Brunel University and the University of Oxford’s Said Business School, both in the UK, as well as a past Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, in the US – holds the values of journalism dear. One of these is that journalists are watchdogs against malfeasance by those who occupy positions of authority in all sectors of society.
Thus, Chin’ono, who won the CNN African Journalist of the Year in 2008, has relentlessly worked to expose corruption by Zimbabwe government officials. This included Zimbabwe’s own Covidgate, where those with connections to politicians would acquire personal protective equipment in China at dirt-cheap prices and resell it to the Ministry of Health for hugely inflated amounts. One of the President’s sons was implicated in this scandal.
After weeks of denial and threats against Chin’ono by senior ruling party officials, the President eventually fired the Health Minister and had him arrested – but he was a free man within 24 hours, having been granted bail.
At the time of writing, Chin’ono had been in remand prison for more than a fortnight. His crime? He had reported on a planned mass demonstration against public-sector corruption and the parlous state of the economy, which the powers that be construed as inciting the public to engage in violence.
That reports about corruption by Zimbabwe’s politicians and their associates have become a regular phenomenon is not because they have been angels all along and have suddenly become venal. No. Mugabe, being the wily political operator that he was, brought the country’s biggest media group under State control on attaining independence in 1980 and staffed it with dyed-in-the-wool party supporters who neither heard nor saw any evil about Mugabe and his administration. The country’s very few independent newspapers have been too timid to expose the shenanigans of those in government.
But thanks to social media, government control of the media does not count for much anymore, as bold journalists like Chin’ono now frequently break big corruption stories on Facebook and Twitter. And formal media outlets, including the likes of the BBC, have proved to be more than willing to republish these stories.
A big tragedy for Zimbabwe is that corruption – of a different sort – seems to have creeped into the judiciary. Days before his arrest, Chin’ono published a leaked memo in which the Chief Justice instructed judges to ensure their judgements were “seen” and “approved” by heads of courts before handing them down. He backed off after an outcry.