MASVINGO — Deputy secretary -general of the Law Society of Zimbabwe, Wilbert Mandinde has lamented the oppressive media environment currently obtaining in the country.
Addressing a media workshop organised by the Media Institute of Southern Africa (Misa-Zimbabwe chapter) in Masvingo last Friday, Mandinde said media laws operating in Zimbabwe were unfriendly to journalists and consumers of media products.
The workshop was meant to afford journalists and media lawyers an opportunity to take stock of their working environment and to draft advocacy strategies that would ensure adoption of media-friendly laws.
“There are a lot of threats to the media which include harassment of media practitioners and even the end users, where some people are threatened for reading newspapers and vendors selling certain newspapers are harassed,” said Mandinde.
“Some publications can be barred from coming into the country and in as far as there has been opening up of the rint media, the electronic media has not been opened up and people should press that the new constitution should enshrine a direct right to freedom of the Press,” he said.
Mandinde singled used words such as “democratic society” and described them as vague saying they needed to be explicitly defined in the new governance charter. He said the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA) was oppressive to the extent that even if journalists were accredited with the Zimbabwe Media Commission, this did not give them free rein to cover all State functions.
“The Public Order and Security Act (POSA) has also not made very good reading and the most commonly used section against people is the one on insulting the President because people are arrested even when giving constructive criticism or while engaging in general conversation in public transport,” said Mandinde.
He also said the Broadcasting Services Act needed to be overhauled as it gave the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC) authority to demand licence fees from owners of radio and television sets regardless of whether they tuned to ZBC channels.
