CJA E-letter

Issue No 2 October 2003

Page 2 The Daily News, Harare, closed by police, is reborn on-line

Page 3 Journalists killed in India and Pakistan

Page 4 News in brief: Africa

Page 5 More from Africa: Training and award offers

Page 6 Down Memory Lane

New executive director takes over

Please welcome Sunity Maharaj as the CJA's executive director, based at a new head office at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad. There is to be a high profile launch of the new headquarters in January.

Sunity, formerly editor in chief of the Trinidad Express newspaper, is raising money for a CJA training programme in the Caribbean. Her brief is to consolidate and develop the CJA's 25-year achievement in promoting rights of journalists
and, in particular, the quality of Commonwealth journalism. You can reach her on e-mail at sunimaha@hotmail.com.

The Commonwealth Media Development Fund is backing four CJA training courses to be held by next March: budget reporting in Bangladesh, good governance in Cameroon, basic finance in The Gambia and reporting conflict (Belfast). It is providing three-quarters of the £40,000 which the CJA requested. What the CMDF gives for the Belfast course has to be matched by other donors.

In London, the CJA now has use of a room at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, 28 Russell Square, WC1. This is manned only intermittently. A social event to promote interest in the CJA among London-based journalists is planned for November 28.

The CJA website is to be relaunched in free web space, probably that of the School of Advanced Studies, London University. But first a designer for the site is being recruited.

Letter from Harare

The Daily News is reborn on-line

Zimbabwe's  Supreme Court ruled in September that Associated Newspapers of Zimbabwe, publishers of  the privately -owned  The Daily News,  was operating illegally. It had violated the draconian Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act, which requires publishers and journalists to be registered. Police closed it down. But it is relaunching itself on-line from Sandton, South Africa.

Chief Justice Godfrey Chidyausiku,, a supporter of President Robert Mugabe's governing Zanu-PF party, made the Supreme Court ruling after Professor Jonathan Moyo, Zimbabwe’s Minister of Information who crafted the controversial Act, asked the court to refuse to hear an application by ANZ challenging sections of it..

ANZ, partly-owned by a Zimbabwean businessman, Strive Masiyiwa, who is based in South Africa, publishes The Daily News (a national daily) and The Daily News on Sunday. The Mugabe government has accused The Daily News of being a mouthpiece of Tony Blair, the British prime minister, and of the main opposition party in Zimbabwe, the Movement for Democratic Change. Police confiscated 73 computers
belonging to ANZ after it published a paper a day after the court ruling.

The police were temporarily removed on 19 September, sent in again a few hours later and withdrawn on September 21, allowing staff to enter. But they could not work as they had no computers to work on. A High Court judge gave ANC a two-month reprieve during which it was supposed to register as a publishing house. Police released the 73 computers briefly but confiscated most of them soon after.

The company paid the registration fee and filed its papers but registration was refused. So The Daily News is not appearing in Harare, which deprives hundreds of thousands of readers of an alternative to the government-run Herald, the only other national daily. On September 24, The Herald raised its cover price from 300 Zimbabwe dollars to 500. It also raised its advertising rates. Fifteen Daily News journalists have been charged with practising journalism unregistered.

The Daily News, which began publishing in March 2000, sold 129,000 copies at its peak when Geoffrey Nyarota was editor in chief. Nyarota was unceremoniously removed from his post by management following an industrial strike on December 30, 2002, and replaced by the news editor, John Gambanga. 

In May a new editorial team, headed by Francis Mdhlongwa, came in. Mdhlongwa appointed as editor Nqobile Nyathi, a young graduate from Rhodes University in South Africa with whom he had worked on the weekly Financial Gazette in Harare. He engaged other staff from the Financial Gazette and fired most of the seniors at The Daily News. Gambanga was demoted to the post of editor at large.But sales of The Daily News nosedived from a daily average of 75,000 May to 45,000 in September.

On October 3, Professor Moyo threatened action against two weeklies which have criticised the government, The Standard and the Zimbabwe Independent.

Journalists killed in the sub-continent

Parmanand Goyal, a reporter for Punjab Kesari in India, was shot dead in front of his family on September 18. At the time he was on bail, facing corruption charges which his family says were fabricated. According to his son, visitors had told him to stop publishing articles criticising the police and the chief minister of Haryana state.

Across the border in Pakistan, journalists in several cities in Sindh demonstrated against the murder on October 3 of 30-year-old Amir Bus Brohi, a correspondent in Shikarpur for the Sindhi-language Daily Kawish and the TV station KTN. Brohi, who had written about abuses by police and landowners’ agents, was stopped and shot by three men on his way to work.

News in brief

Pakistan: Reporters sans Frontieres has appealed for a Pakistani editor, sentenced to death two years ago on allegedly trumped-up charges of drug trafficking, to be transferred to hospital. He has heart and back problems and, until recently had no mattress in his cell. Rehmat Shah Afridi used to edit the Frontier Post and Maidan which frequently exposed drug trafficking and illegal arms sales.

Two leading members of the Tribal Union of Journalists in the Khyber Agency, North-West Pakistan, were imprisoned and threatened in September by a banned religious organisation which they had accused of abducting two people.

Ehsan Sehar, editor of a weekly in the South Punjab, Nawa-I-Ahmedpur Sharqia, writes that he took part in a televised discussion of the role of the media in Pakistani life away from the big cities. He also says that only one of the guests at the opening of the CJA course in Ahmedpur East (reported in the CJA Newsletter e-mailed in June) made allegations against local journalists.

India Tehelka.com, the investigative website crushed by the Indian government after it filmed defence officials’ willingness to accept bribes, has relaunched itself as a weekly paper. Subscribers include novelist V.S.Naipaul, BBC veteran Sir Mark Tully and Bollywood’s best paid leading man, Shah Rukh Khan.

Bangladesh A Khulna magistrate cleared Dainik Prabarttan correspondent Hiramon Mondol of extortion charges. He had accused police in August of stealing fish from local fishermen. Before arrest he was beaten with hockey sticks and rifles.

Pacific Control of the struggling Daily Post was taken over in September by the government of Fiji, its biggest shareholder, from a management company.

Pacific Journalism Review, previously based in Papua New Guinea and Fiji, is now published by Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand. Contributors to the latest edition include outspoken Australian campaigner John Pilger.

Sir Len Usher, a father of journalism in Fiji and long-serving editor-in-chief of the Fiji Times, has died aged 96. He went to Fiji from New Zealand as a teacher.

Sri Lanka A parliamentary committee is reviewing the law on contempt of court, as a result of an outcry against a one-year sentence imposed by the chief justice on Michael Fernando who criticised him.

News in brief: Africa

South African editor Mathatha Tsedu is to chair a conference in Kinshasa next April to launch the African Editors Forum. More information from saeditor@iafrica.com.

Gambia Aboulaye Sey, editor-in-chief of the bi-weekly Independent, says that intelligence agents who held him for three days in September threatened to kill him if he continued to criticise the government.

Kenya David Makali, editor of the Sunday edition of the East African Standard, was detained in September and accused of stealing a police videotape after he and colleagues refused to disclose the source of confessions reported in a Standard article. The article said some suspects had implicated a prominent politician in the murder of a constitutional committee chairman. The Standard denies having the tape.

Malawi The High Court in September awarded £300 damages to Nation reporter Donald Chapalapata who was assaulted during an interview with an official of the National Food Reserve Agency, about contracts given to insiders.

The Malawi Communications Regulatory Authority, which earlier tried to stop community radios from airing news, threatened to shut down Capital Radio for doing an outside broadcast. Capital had been covering political rallies.

Blantyre police in September accused Frank Namangale of the Daily Times of publishing false information likely to cause alarm. Namangale had reported that an armed robbery suspect was President Muluzi’s son. A police spokesman said he was the adopted son of Muluzi’s late brother.

Three journalists on The New Sun, which supports President Muluzi, were fined £3,000 in July for defaming a bank director by accusing him of having an affair.

Mozambique A Mozambican judge, Dr Augusto Raul Paulino, has been awarded the Press Freedom Award of the Media Institute of Southern Africa. He presided over the trial of the murderers of the investigative journalist Carlo Cardoso.

Namibia The Namibian Broadcasting Corporation has made management changes in a bid to end its reliance on government subsidies. The general manager, news and current affairs, is now Menesia Muinjo, who used to report on President Nujoma.

An insurance company, Legal Shield Namibia, has ceased advertising in the government-owned New Era. The bi-weekly had reported allegations of unfair dismissal and of the demotion of a manager’s assistant for refusing to play paintball.

More from Africa

Nigeria Tunde Akinleye, a photojournalist with the Daily Independent, was beaten unconscious on August 30 by police attached to Vice-President Abubakar. On September 17 security men ejected Cyril Mbah, The Monitor’s presidential correspondent, from the presidential villa - apparently for disparaging the President.

Sierra Leone Paul Kamara, founding editor of the popular For Di People, was detained three times by police in October. The paper had challenged a parliamentary statement by the Speaker, defending President Kabbah’s fitness to govern. The president was criticised in a fraud inquiry in 1968 when he was a civil servant. Kamara was in prison six months last year for defaming a judge.

South Africa Ranjeni Munusamy, formerly of the Sunday Times, has been subpoenaed to appear before a commission seeking the source of a story she gave the rival City Press. It was that the African National Congress had investigated allegations about the national director of public prosecutions spying for the former apartheid government. Munusamy gave her story and related documents to the City Press after the Sunday Times declined to publish it.

The Natal Witness has launched a Saturday paper, Weekend Witness, at a low cover price, hoping to win readers in Durban as well as its Pietermaritzburg base.

A TV current-affairs cameraman was pinned to the ground and his producer threatened by an allegedly racist assailant in upmarket Sandton, Johannesburg.

Tanzania Ali Nabwa, editor of the independent weekly Dira, has been banned from working in Zanzibar. The government maintains he is a citizen of the Comoros.

Zimbabwe Cyril Zenda, a journalist with the Financial Gazette, was attacked in October by vigilantes associated with the ruling ZANU-PF party. They robbed him of money and his mobile phone and tore from him a tee-shirt bearing the message: Free My Voice. Free the Airwaves.

Training and award offers

African student journalists are eligible for a four-month, on-the-job political reporting course arranged by the Washington Center for Politics and Journalism in the US capital. Apply by October 31. Details: infopak@wcpj.org

Journalists who report on the impact of information technology on rural communities are eligible for the African Information Society Initiative Media Awards. Apply by February 1. Details: ecainfo@uneca.org

The Swedish international development agency is funding a two-week seminar at Mbabane (Swaziland), March 8-19, to train journalistic trainers. Apply by December 15. Details: rantwi@nsjtraining.org

Down Memory Lane

HIRO SHROFF is an exile, still - after half a century – nostalgic for his native Sindh and its people, its language, its customs, its food. He has also been a foreign correspondent for the Press Trust of India during India’s and Pakistan’s first decade of independence, hobnobbing with the leaders who set these Asian stars on their present courses. The nostalgia, and the people he knew, are the stuff of his book Down Memory Lane.

Published by Eeshwar of Girgaon, Mumbai, it is made up of newspaper essays in which Hiro reflected, and got many others to reflect, on past times. It dwells not so much on history as on the footnotes of history: the odd things that happened, the famous and influential at less guarded moments, as seen by kindly observers. Hiro sees the people he writes about as resembling the gentlemen, and ladies, of old: humble, principled, determined, gruff sometimes but always courtly. There’s not a vulgar, conniving, intrusive journalist in sight. Even a Pakistani officer intent on throwing a Hindu journalist out of a railway train in the dark Partition days behaves in a courtly manner. He spares the Hindu’s life because of his bravery in facing death.

Hiro, himself a Hindu, was working for the Sind Observer when India was partitioned. He covered for it the Indian ‘police action’ that took over the princely state of Hyderabad from its ruling prince, the Nizam - whose etiquette he affectionately describes. Not long after, Hiro had to leave Sindh, which had become part of Muslim Pakistan.

But he was soon back. After a spell at the Theosophical Society’s world headquarters in Madras, he joined the Press Trust of India, successor to Reuter’s Indian news network. When a pact made it possible for PTI and Reuters to send a correspondent to Pakistan, they chose Hiro. He stayed in Karachi (in Sindh) for five years, watching the rise and fall of Pakistani leaders. Then he was exiled once again. But he went on to serve PTI in other capitals including Beijing and Cairo (where he stood in for the expelled Reuter correspondent during the 1956 Suez war)

Hiro interviewed everyone – Nehru, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Sukarno, Pope Paul VI (whom he served as press officer on a visit to India). To his surprise, he found himself talking to Chou en-Lai, Mao’s right hand man, in English. So why, he asked Chou, did he normally use an interpreter when he could speak English well? “It gives me time to think,” Chou replied.

Hiro’s e-mail address is hiroshroff@hotmail.com. He is continuing his oral history project, recording interviews with people who have witnessed India and its life.

Thank you, Ifex and MISA

THE EDITOR thanks the International Freedom of Expression Exchange and the Media Institute of Southern Africa for news used in this letter.