Charamba should put up or shut up

By Muckracker | 2h ago

George Charamba

DID anyone read the Herald editorial headed: ‘Minister Chombo doing sterling job?’

The paper claimed the minister had “wielded the axe and read the riot act to the management of municipalities that have failed to deliver efficient services”, He was also advised to ignore “blinkered” detractors who accused him of carrying out a “purge” of MDC councillors.

Meanwhile, Harare, Mutare and Chitungwiza municipalities were singled out as the “worst managed local authorities in the country”.

In classic contradiction, the editor doesn’t say why Chombo has not axed the commission he appointed to run Harare since the dismissal of Elias Mudzuri in May 2003. Instead, the commission has had its term extended while Chombo has unilaterally declared there won’t be council elections in Harare until 2008.

What improvements has Sekesai Makwavarara and her team brought to Harare ratepayers? There is reason to get suspicious when editors sacrifice ethics and go out of their way to flatter a minister who, for all practical purposes, deserves nothing short of the sack himself.

His latest “sterling job” was presumably to bring cholera closer to the Harare Sheraton to give tourists a taste of Zimbabwean hospitality!

The Sunday Mail comment on the commission’s performance was closer to the truth.

“They are doing no better than the councillors and mayors who have been dismissed in Chitungwiza and elsewhere,” said the Mail in its editorial on Sunday.

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Another group that needs to get a life is the delegation of African-Americans currently visiting Zimbabwe. After paying “homage” to resident minister David Karimanzira, this gang of tunnel-vision tourists declared Zimbabwe to be a model for all of Africa to emulate.

The leader of the gang, Clinton Crawford, said the visit was “an eye-opener” because they were misinformed about the situation on the ground.

We wonder how open his eyes were when he couldn’t see the raw sewage flowing in Chitungwiza or people displaced by Murambatsvina sleeping out in the rain and living in plastic shacks.

Another member of the group, Eudora Cox, claimed to have moved around the country for four days and “I have not seen any fighting”. So she came here expecting to see people carrying guns in the city centre as they do in Liberia? Which media was she reading, that is if she can read at all?

“Due to circumstances beyond our control we are unable to bring the column, The Other Side, by Nathaniel Manheru,” the editor of the Herald announced last Saturday.

This struck us as rather strange. If he meant Manheru was on leave, why didn’t he say so?

“Circumstances beyond our control” suggests a technical breakdown. The last time this occurred Manheru was spotted hosting a Press Freedom Day function at the Sheraton the night before. Perhaps “indisposed” would have been a better excuse on that occasion!

So what was Manheru up to last Saturday which prevented the Herald from “bringing” his customary vitriolic contribution to readers?

We don’t know for sure. But the following day the Sunday Mail published a lengthy attack on human rights lawyer Beatrice Mtetwa by presidential spokesman George Charamba occupying the space where the vacuous Lowani Ndlovu used to squat. He appeared bitterly resentful that Mtetwa had won a number of international awards for her defence of individuals finding themselves on the receiving end of state depredations.

Charamba appeared to think that one of those organisations, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, was called the “Canadian Committee to Protect Journalists”, thus revealing, for one attributing “loud and assertive ignorance” to others, an inexcusably faulty grasp of his subject matter.

Proceeding from this customary carelessness, Charamba argued that Mtetwa’s success in court did not necessarily imply that Aippa was a bad law.

“She is probably grateful that the state did not follow through,” he claimed, going on to threaten that Mtetwa would soon discover that “the state can and often does pursue cases doggedly right to exhaustion”.

If the truth be known, Mtetwa and other lawyers dealing with Aippa cases would probably welcome the state pursuing cases “to exhaustion” so the gaping flaws in that poorly framed legislation can be further exposed to public ridicule.

With the exception of a minor prosecution in the Midlands, the state has lost every single case it has brought under Aippa. The Act-portrayed by Charamba as “a legitimate law” just because Zanu PF passed it — has been a public relations disaster for the regime, which may explain Charamba’s resentment.

Claims that the government was about to repeal Aippa were “fatuous, unclear dreams”, he sternly declared.

Indeed, repeal may be wishful thinking. But a drastic pruning is not entirely inconceivable, as government law officers assured the African Commission for Human and Peoples’ Rights in Banjul last month. We certainly hope those assurances of a complete overhaul in the legislation from the Attorney-General’s Office were not designed to mislead the African Union so that Zimbabwean officials at home can continue harassing journalists.

Charamba proceeds from the controversial to the ridiculous. He chose to quarrel with Mtetwa over the definition of licensing, claiming “journalists can never be licensed under Aippa and she should know that. Aippa lays firm ground for refusing to accredit a journalist and nowhere is government’s political predilection a basis for denying accreditation”.

What is accreditation if not a system of licensing journalists? And of course it is abused for political purposes. Journalists have been refused accreditation on the grounds that they have been convicted in court of newspaper-related offences when those convictions have been over-turned on appeal.

The MIC comprises, among others, former state newspaper editors who are appointed by the Minister of Information. Its chairman writes unashamedly partisan — if incoherent columns in the government press which regularly attack the private media over which he presides.

Charamba refers to Ijaz as set up “at the behest of hostile foreign interests”. But he doesn’t mention his own ties to these same “hostile” foreign interests.

“Many other dirty things happened, things which are unprintable and touching the very pith of ethical conduct in the legal profession,” Charamba claims in relation to imaginary Western-sponsored organisations.

He should be told to pith off. There is nothing worse than a coy government spokesman. Either that or he should have the courage of his convictions and tell us what he is talking about. That includes describing Trevor Ncube as a publisher “in partnership with we-know-who”.

Charamba is always suggesting he knows more than he does. He should put up or shut up. Anyway, since when has Charamba recoiled from the unprintable!

The Foreign Correspondents Association may want to know, by the way, that Sloppy George has renamed them the Foreign Correspondences Association. Let’s hope he never gets a job at a newspaper!

Aippa has many parallels in many jurisdictions, chiefly those of the West, he claims. This lie was successfully exploded when the Swedish government took a party of journalists to Stockholm to see how their media laws work.

State scribes were prevented from going at the last minute in case they learnt the truth about foolish claims that Aippa was similar to legislation elsewhere. It has no parallels in democratic societies. And now the African Commission has ruled that it is not simply a bad law but an unacceptable law in terms of African governance.

The commission will be hearing related cases soon on the grounds that the applicants cannot secure justice in their own courts. This tends to bear out Mtetwa’s claim that the Zimbabwean judiciary has been “severely compromised”, a point which Charamba appears to think they will “respond” to.

It is one of Charamba’s duties to defend the indefensible. But personal attacks of this nature upon one of the country’s most respected lawyers, simply because she has embarrassed the regime by standing up to its threats, is cowardly and distasteful.

However, we have no doubt that Mtetwa, who has been the subject of several state assaults and demonstrated more courage than all the president’s “men” put together, is capable of standing up for herself.

Perhaps this Sunday Charamba, instead of bashing women lawyers, will explain his role in the Tsholotsho Declaration which he appears understandably keen to avoid!

Muckraker was intrigued with remarks by justice Maphios Cheda at the opening of the legal year in Bulawayo last week. He criticised legal firms that had ignored human rights during the liberation war, but were now “in the forefront in singing very loudly about human rights violations”.

It is difficult to establish the logic here.

Does this mean that a law firm or legal practitioner would have to demonstrate a record of human rights work in the 1960s and 70s before being entitled to take such cases now? Supposing the firm has taken on new partners or changed hands, as so many have, or been set up since 1980? How do we assess its suitability?

And what about those lawyers who were youngsters or not yet born in the 1970s? Are they unable to work now on human rights cases because they don’t have a war record?

And what about other newcomers to the legal scene that support the present regime despite its record of human rights violations? Where do we place them and how will they be regarded 25 years hence?

Justice Cheda singled out Chief Justice Chidyausiku, among others, for his role in fighting for human rights during the liberation war.

We would be keen to have the details. We recall that he was a member of the Rhodesian parliament occupying one of 15 seats set aside for blacks. We also recall an incident involving his appearance before the House in a colourful outfit, described by the media at the time as a “zoot-suit”. If there is more we would like to hear it.

We note that in addition to Chidyausiku, Justice Cheda praised the role of “unsung heroes"”such as former Chief Justice Fieldsend, former Justices Fergus Blackie, Kennedy Sibanda and Washington Sansole and Bulawayo-based legal practitioners Ben Baron, Lot Senda, Charles Lazarus, E Greenfield and Brice Longhurst.

To that list we would add late Chief Justice Enoch Dumbutshena, who provided this nation with a fine example of judicial integrity, unafraid of state blandishments; and Anthony Eastwood who defended many prominent nationalists in the Salisbury courts.

A footnote: When Chief Justice Fieldsend was told his contract was up in the early 1980s (in fact he didn’t have one), prime minister Robert Mugabe told ZTV: “We want a black for that job.”

He got his wish. A West Indian judge on the Zimbabwean bench, Justice Telford Georges, was duly appointed. But a few months later, he disclosed he had been offered a more attractive post as Chief Justice of a Caribbean state. As a result Justice Dumbutshena was elevated to the job and he became the country’s first black Zimbabwean Chief Justice as distinct from first black chief justice as some newspapers reported at the time of his death.

The government’s war against new dimensions recently when the name of the Blair Research Laboratory was changed to the National Institute of Research, Health and Child Welfare. The lab was named after one of the country’s leading scientists who, through no choice of his own, shared his name with the British PM. What next? Perhaps they will rename Blair toilets “Tambaogas” or “Lasts” as in “Relief at Last”.

Muckraker was highly entertained by the Herald’s chess column recently. Its author, “The Sacker”, reported “a brilliant week of play” at the Harare Prison Complex.

The “Best Inmate” prize went to Nextman Fuzane who scored seven points. He played “very aggressive chess”, we are told, “and gave many top players a real scare”.

The “Best Prison Officer” prize went to Officer Better Smiling.

“William Goshe took the Stupid Award,” the Herald reports, “for stealing chess pieces in front of prison officers”.