THE constitutional application filed by Harare West legislator Jessie Majome seeking to have the court declare as unconstitutional the compulsory payment of listeners’ licences to the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC) by citizens, was yesterday deferred to June 25.
CHARLES LAITON SENIOR COURT REPORTER
Chief Justice Godfrey Chidyausiku ordered the matter to be consolidated with other applications.
Chief Justice Chidyausiku, who is the head of the Constitutional Court (ConCourt), ordered that all the matters that were supposed to be heard yesterday be consolidated into a single matter since they were all related.
He further ordered that only one lawyer from all the four matters that were set for hearing yesterday be selected to represent the others and the same to apply for the officers from the Prosecutor-General (PG)’s office.
This, he said, would be done in order not to duplicate matters and issues to be deliberated upon by the same court.
The four matters postponed yesterday were: Majome versus ZBC; Musangano Lodge versus The State; Bernard Wekare versus The Attorney-General’s Office and another; and African Open Media Initiative versus the State.
Last month, while opposing the action by the top MDC-T official, Majome, the government described her ConCourt challenge as mischievous.
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Majome approached the ConCourt seeking an order to strike down provisions of the country’s broadcasting laws which compel citizens to pay listener’s licences to the national broadcaster for as long as they own receivers.
Majome contends ZBC’s television station and four radio stations were all biased towards Zanu PF and that they did not give MDC-T enough airspace in the election campaigns.
But government, in its opposing affidavit, accused Majome of harbouring intentions to cripple the national broadcaster, which has been struggling to pay its workers and to service its aging broadcasting equipment.
Through its lawyers, the government further argued Majome was approaching the courts with “dirty hands” having openly refused to pay the listener’s licence fees for two years.
