State of the media in Southern Africa - 2003 ing of The Daily News in March 1999. It was a magnanimous dream that had as its roots service to the Zimbabwean citizenry. The newspaper has grown from strength to strength almost solely due to Geoff’s skill in assembling a team of some of Zimbabwe’s most skilled and professional newspaper practitioners in every field. The trail that The Daily News blazes has come at a price - the paper’s journalists have been harassed and attacked; in some parts of the country people can only read the paper in secret for fear of reprisals. The application of the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Acts in Zimbabwe has led to the closure of The Daily News and its sister paper, The Daily News on Sunday. 2001 – Carlos Alberto Cardoso he late Carlos Alberto Cardoso, editor of Metical, was murdered on 22 November 2000. He studied in South Africa, where be became involved in radical, anti-apartheid student politics, which earned him expulsion from the country. Back in Maputo, he identified with the revolution against Portuguese colonial rule, although he never became a member of the Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo). His exceptional talents as a writer ensured a rapid rise in the world of journalism. He worked first on the weekly magazine Tempo, then briefly on Radio Mozambique, before he was appointed chief news editor of the Mozambique News Agency (AIM) in 1980. There were often tensions between the open and outspoken brand of journalism practiced by Cardoso, and the altogether more cautious approach followed by the Frelimo leadership and by the Ministry of Information. In 1982, this clash resulted in the sudden imprisonment of Cardoso, apparently because an opinion article he wrote in the daily paper Noticias violated an obscure government guideline on covering the war. Six days after his arrest he was released and he was fully reinstated at the head of AIM. Cardoso was deeply affected by the death of Machel in a plane crash just inside South Africa, on 19 October 1986. He followed the story of the plane crash with tenacity, and built up a picture of the likely causes of the crash - deliberate electronic interference by the Apartheid military. In the late 1980s, Cardoso found himself in conflict with Information Minister Teodato Hunguana, leading to his resignation. In 1990, Cardoso was among a group of journalists campaigning for the inclusion of a specific commitment to press freedom in the new constitution. The clauses on the media in the 1990 constitution, and the follow-up press law of 1991, are among the most liberal in Africa. In 1992, Cardoso and a dozen others founded a journalists’ cooperative, Mediacoop, launching Mediafax. A dispute in Mediacoop in 1997 led to Cardoso leaving the cooperative to set up Metical. Cardoso campaigned tirelessly against what he regarded as the disastrous recipes for the economy imposed by the World Bank and the IMF, championing the fight of the cashew processing industry and later of the sugar industry, against liberalisation measures. In 1998 Cardoso stood as an independent candidate for the Maputo municipal assembly. The independent grouping, known as “Juntos pela Cidade” won 26 per cent of the vote, and became the opposition in the city assembly. Cardoso then threw himself into municipal politics. Among the scandals Cardoso had been investigating in the last months of his life, one stands out above all others. This was the largest banking fraud in the country’s history. In 1996, a well-organised criminal network stole the equivalent of $14 million out of Mozambique’s largest bank, BCM. Although the names of the main suspects were known there was no prosecution and no trial. That this was dangerous territory became clear in November 1999, when the BCM’s lawyer, Albano Silva, narrowly escaped an assassination attempt. T So This Is Democracy? 2003 156 Media Institute of Southern Africa