State of the media in Southern Africa - 2003 Regional Overview by JEANETTE MINNIE Jeanette Minnie is a South African citizen and an international Freedom of Expression consultant. She is a former Regional Director of MISA. She is also known as Zambezi FoX - the name of her consultancy service. S ince the turn of this century Zimbabwe has topped the list as the most repressive country in the SADC region in terms of media freedom violations. MISA has recorded 360 alerts in Zimbabwe in the four-year period from 2000 - 2003. In 2003 the alerts from Zimbabwe represented 54% of the total recorded in 10 countries and in 2002, 57% of the total in 11 countries. The forced state closure of the Daily News on 12 September 2003, on charges that it was publishing illegally without a state license, was undoubtedly the worst news of the previous year. It should be recalled that this event was preceded by three bomb and arson attacks on various premises of the Daily News in earlier years. The biggest was the 2001 destruction of its newly acquired printing press by four massive explosions. According to the country essay in this edition, The Daily News enjoyed the biggest newspaper circulation in the country estimated at 59% of the market share and up to a million readers on peak days. Two other media outlets were also destroyed by bomb attacks in Zimbabwe in recent years. In 2002 the premises of the Voice of the People radio station in Harare were destroyed by a massive bomb blast. In the same year the premises of a commercial printing press, the Daily Press, was also destroyed in a bomb attack. Among other things, it had printed T-shirts for the official opposition ‘Movement for Democratic Change’ party. To date no one has been charged by the police in relation to these attacks. The Daily News was created in 1999 as a bulwark against the unrelenting state propaganda and hate speech in the state-owned national daily newspaper, The Herald, and the state-owned television and radio broadcasting services, the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC). The Media Monitoring Project of Zimbabwe (MMPZ) reported that during the 2002 presidential and mayoral elections, the ZBC television news devoted 94% of its airtime to the ruling party ZANU-PF and its presidential candidate (President Robert Mugabe) and only 4% to the official opposition Movement for Democratic Change and its candidate (Morgan Tsvangirai). “But even this [4%] was subverted by ZBC, which used the time to attack, denigrate and discredit the MDC”.1 The reason for the demise of the Daily News is the promulgation of one of the most effective legal instruments of state control over the media and civil society communication anywhere in the world - the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA). Ironically, the misleadingly named AIPPA in significant respects substantively obstructs the release of official information to the public from the state, because the law classifies huge swathes of this information as secret. In reality the AIPPA was purposely crafted as an instrument of state control over the privately owned media and other civil society and non-governmental publishing, Internet and broadcasting operations in the country. A major feature of this law is the requirement that all ‘mass media services’ must be licensed (‘registered’) by the state appointed Media and Information Commission (MIC). Such services also have to reapply for registration every two years, although registration can be withdrawn from them at any time. All journalists have to apply for So This Is Democracy? 2003 7 Media Institute of Southern Africa