Last Updated: Thursday, 9 January 2003
Nyarota’s dismissal from paper was overdue
Editor — It seems that those who have been championing the twin operations
"Operation oust Mugabe" and "Operation restore colonial rule" are one by one
becoming victims of the same forces for which they have been working all along.
The zest with which they have been part of this crusade resulted in the willful
suspension of all reason that human beings are equipped or endowed with.
They allowed their very being and their senses to be overtaken by an agenda
whose formative origins have nothing to do with the realities that Zimbabweans
face on a day-to-day basis.
Notwithstanding the falsehoods that their papers have been feeding the reading
public in Zimbabwe, in violation of all journalistic norms of professionalism, some
of them have been given awards which, in my view, serves to sanction the kind of
professional malpractice that had become the hallmark of the likes of Geoff
Nyarota.
The dishing out of these awards also has an underlying cynical, quite
contemptuous element to it — that Nyarota’s kind of journalism is okay in Africa
but not so in other parts of the world, especially the Western world. With the
number of false stories that Nyarota has published, he would never be a bona fide
journalist in any Western country and yet these are the same countries that have
showered him with awards.
If this is not cynical or contemptuous of the African or Zimbabwean being then I
am not sure what is!
Other journalists like Basildon Peta and David Masunda, because they failed to
exercise even the slightest kind of personal restraint necessary to garner respect
and admiration, have fallen from grace in a manner parallel to the most recent
disgrace to hit the independent media in Zimbabwe.
The independent media landscape has just been reshaped by what can be termed
the unceremonious departure of Nyarota from The Daily News. This was, in
essence, overdue.
Now that Nyarota has been relieved of his responsibilities at The Daily News, I
hope it is an opportunity for the paper to have a new beginning.
We hope that reason will ultimately prevail at an institution once devoid of all the
canons that define what journalism is.
This will indeed help reshape the editorial environment, not into one where white
supremacy is trumpeted and where Zimbabweans are brainwashed into adorning
colonial era repression.
That editorial environment should not foster an archaic and dangerous belief that
being white or black defines what a human being can or cannot do — the colour of
one’s skin in no way places limitations on what one can or cannot achieve.
That’s why some of us dismiss as sheer nonsense the sentiment within the
independent media that land reclamation equals food crisis in Zimbabwe because
blacks can’t farm.
If someone can arrive in Zimbabwe by boat and masters an environment in which
blacks are natives, what logic is in the argument that the natives, who have
inhabited this environment for centuries, can’t master it to produce their own
food?
I have never heard of such kind of defeatist argument.
W. T. Kanyongo.
US.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"Ivinicus factus sum veritabem diceus." ( I have become an enemy for speaking the truth ) St Paul!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Mitayo Potosi
_________________________________________________________________
STOP MORE SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail
