The following was written by Pretoria-based ASFL Executive Board Member Martin van Staden

According to an article in The Guardian dated 3 November 2015, three Zimbabwean journalists working for the weekly newspaper The Sunday Mail were arrested for making claims the government found unfavorable. They have since been released on bail.

Mabasa Sasa, Brian Chitemba, and Tinashe Farawo were arrested for “peddling falsehoods” and “lying”, after alleging on the front page that certain police officers as well as “other officials” were involved in poisoning elephants for their tusks. In October alone, 62 elephants were killed in the Hwange National Park.

The police felt that the culprits should have been named and identified, which the journalists did not do. This, the police said, “sensationalizes the matter”. But as the Zimbabwe Union of Journalists’ Foster Dongozi correctly points out, the police are in any case supposed to be pursuing the poachers, not the journalists who investigate and report.

Section 61 of the Constitution of Zimbabwe protects media and press freedom. Even the exceptions clause does not empower the police to act in this manner: arbitrarily criminalizing a matter which would otherwise be within the jurisdiction of civil courts if a case of misrepresentation of fact could be made. What is most striking about the story is, however, that The Sunday Mail is owned and operated by the Zimbabwean government. Section 61(4) also regulates state-owned media and similarly makes no provision for this kind of tyranny.

But Zimbabwe is not known for its adherence to the rule of law, even though a founding value of that country in Section 3 of the Constitution is that the rule of law is a foundational principle underlying the Zimbabwean legal order. Robert Mugabe has ruled the country with an iron fist since the early 1980s and has seen three different constitutions (one being unofficial) during his reign.

With next year being my final year as a law student, I am obliged to write a dissertation. Media freedom and media law have always been close to my heart and thus my chosen topic for the thesis is how the State’s political considerations influence, unduly, the exercise of freedom of expression; albeit in the South African context. In my research I came upon something profound which John Stuart Mill wrote in his seminal work On Liberty in 1859 – over 150 years ago. Mill wrote in the first line to the second chapter that he hoped (and impliedly believed) defending freedom of the press would no longer be necessary. So settled did he think – in 1859 – the topic of press freedom was.

Of course, he wouldn’t have gone on to write a defense of it if the matter was truly settled. Even in ‘the West’ the topic is not nearly settled, with both the governments of the United Kingdom and the United States still regulating media to an extent in some or other ‘public interest’ function. South African press freedom has been surprisingly strong since the end of Apartheid, but this too, I wrote elsewhere, we should not take for granted.

Press freedom, moreover media freedom, is widely regarded as the first and last line of defense for democracy. Whether with good intentions or bad, the press media is the most effective watchdog of government, next to an armed and conscious citizenry. It is no secret that especially mainstream media houses often toe the government’s ideological line, or, as in some Western nations, become unofficially affiliated with political parties, but at the end of the day they still provide citizens with the basic amount of awareness needed for any society to make decisions.

I have heard from Zimbabweans and other observers that the people of Zimbabwe do not want Mugabe as their president. The last few general elections in that country have been marred in controversy even though the Southern African Development Community and the African Union gave the thumbs up for the result of the last election. But besides that, Mugabe has never enjoyed true legitimacy. A diehard Marxist from the beginning, he was simply waiting for the British to do something perceptively wrong so that he could violate every important provision in the 1980 Lancaster House agreement and turn himself into a true dictator. Indeed, I have often referred to him as ‘Sir Robert, the Lord of Salisbury’, for his inauthentic dedication to ‘African values’ while essentially being an English aristocrat himself.

He lacks legitimacy because his government never remained within its proper bounds: to protect the life, liberty and property of the people. In fact, contrary to those proper duties, the Zimbabwean government has slaughtered tens of thousands of its own citizens, committed wholesale expropriation of property against especially farms, and, of course, violated countless liberties of the people – including press freedom.

Yet Mugabe is the Afrocentrist’s hero, along with Muammar Gadhafi. Africa does not need these types of people, who are just as bad, if not worse, than their colonial predecessors. Africa needs Mandelas and Khamas. What Africa needs more, though, is a strong, principled dedication to libertarian values such as press freedom and government transparency. The Lord of Salisbury and his club of dictators should not be part of the story of Africa’s liberation for they are part of the story of Africa’s continued enslavement.