Zimbabwe newsman ready to try again

The newspaper consists of a small office with one authentically untidy desk and one bare but for a borrowed laptop. A couple of chairs. Newspapers and papers stacked on the floor. And Boss Barns.

That would be Barnabas Thondhlana, one of Zimbabwe’s best-known newspapermen. He sits at the messy desk, explaining the vague order in the various piles. The big one is job applications, hundreds of them. The ones he doesn’t like (including those of four former state spies) get thrown onto the floor. The ones he does like go into several piles on the desk and floor.

Boss Barns, as he’s fondly known to his colleagues and drinking pals at the Quill Club, was there on the day in 2003 when armed police shut down the country’s last independent daily paper, the Daily News. They ordered the journalists out and put a padlock as big as his hand on the front door.

Now the affable 47-year-old is about to launch an independent daily, NewsDay. It’s the first major test of news media freedom under Zimbabwe’s new government of national unity, which was set up in a political compromise after President Robert Mugabe and his ZANU-PF party lost elections last year but refused to give up power.

No launch date has been set for NewsDay. The big question mark is whether the Ministry of Media, Information and Publicity, controlled by hard-line Mugabe loyalists, will give the paper an operating license.

Trevor Ncube, NewsDay backer and owner of the Zimbabwe Independent, a weekly, and South Africa’s Mail and Guardian, said he had spoken to government ministers from all sides. “I haven’t received a single indication that there’s somebody who doesn’t want us to be licensed,” he said in an interview at his office in Johannesburg, South Africa.

His aim is to produce a newspaper trusted not only by ZANU-PF but also by its erstwhile partner in the unity government, the Movement for Democratic Change, or MDC.

“We need a newspaper that says it’s OK to disagree. The fact that I disagree doesn’t mean that I should wish you dead. That’s the environment we have come from,” said Ncube, who describes himself as an idealist.

The Daily News was the first big independent daily in Zimbabwe, where state-controlled and subsidized news media such as the Herald voiced the ruling party line. With the slogan “Telling It Like It Is,” cheeky cartoons and investigative reports on corruption and abuses, the Daily News saw its circulation soar to more than 100,000.

Thondhlana was news editor of the Daily News when it launched in 1999 -- the year the MDC was formed by Morgan Tsvangirai, now the country’s prime minister, and others. Thondhlana later became editor of the Sunday Daily News.

“The vision was to give the population news that was not being covered by the state media. We didn’t think it was dangerous,” Thondhlana said.

But after ZANU-PF was almost defeated in 2000 elections, it cracked down. The spies of the Central Intelligence Organization circled closer.

The paper’s editor, Geoff Nyarota, was riding in an elevator with a stranger one morning. The man confessed that he’d been sent to kill Nyarota, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it, Thondhlana said.

In 2001, a large bomb destroyed the paper’s printing press. Later that year, a shop beneath the editor’s office was blown up. In 2002, the paper’s office in the city of Bulawayo was hit by a gasoline bomb. Nyarota was arrested twice, and numerous other Daily News journalists were arrested and charged.

“Some people [on staff] were saying, ‘Look, we can’t put our lives on the block for a newspaper. Maybe we should leave some of the issues we covered and go more social,’ ” Thondhlana said. But the paper stuck to its guns.

“I said, ‘Guys, let us stay resolved. We are here to provide balanced news. We must stick to that because for every head on a coin, there’s a tail.’

“We just decided we would not accept to be frightened. We would not stop covering the news the way we had covered the news.”

In those days, colleagues recall affectionately, Boss Barns was a real pro. He could have walked straight out of the old Walter Matthau-Jack Lemmon movie “The Front Page.”

Yes, he sometimes took long lunches.

“But he would then come back and work deep into the night to clear everything that was on his table,” said former colleague Augustine Mukaro. “Young guys would compete to be close to Boss Barns, just to enjoy the fun of being near Boss Barns.”

On the day the paper was shut down, the staff, believing the closure was temporary, was afraid to resist the police.

“They just said, ‘This newspaper is closed. You’re going home.’ Armed soldiers came and pushed everybody out,” Thondhlana said. “People just left quietly because these guys were armed. Earlier experience was that guys were beaten on the heads with gun butts and thrown out of the newsrooms.”

Zimbabwe’s media law, which was used to shut down the Daily News, hasn’t been repealed, as Tsvangirai struggles against ZANU-PF hard-liners in the unity government.

There are some ominous signs: The editor and news editor of the Zimbabwe Independent were jailed overnight May 11 for publishing the names of police and intelligence agents who arrested civic and opposition activists last year.

Ncube concedes that it could take time for NewsDay to take off, but believes a freer press for Zimbabwe is near.

“I’m a pragmatist. I don’t expect people who are intolerant of a free press and free flow of information to be born-again lovers of plural media. It will take some cajoling, some trust-building. But it will happen. I have no doubt about that.”

But there are tough financial challenges: Most Zimbabweans are too poor to buy newspapers, and the few surviving businesses can ill afford to advertise.

NewsDay, which aims to surpass the circulation of the Daily News and be profitable in nine months to three years, will take a populist line with the slogan “Everyday News for Everyday People.”

Thondhlana is planning a big front page to launch the paper. He’s thinking of Tsvangirai, the popular prime minister.

To Boss Barns, it’s about news values and pragmatism, not politics.

But why not put Mugabe, the country’s 85-year-old president, on the front?

Thondhlana doesn’t hesitate: “He’s not a seller.”

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robyn.dixon@latimes.com