The powers that be get more desperate

via The powers that be get more desperate – DailyNews Live 3 November 2015

HARARE – It has been another hectic few weeks of frenetic spinning and lying by authorities and lickspittle State media, amid the country’s dying economy and the seemingly unstoppable factional and succession wars devouring President Robert Mugabe’s post-congress Zanu PF.

The main target of these lies and gratuitous attacks by the State, the ruling party and their hired guns have been the country’s independent media – all for the crime of telling it like it is, without fear or favour, as our motto at the Daily News goes.

And with the desperate times clearly demanding desperate measures from the powers that be, a very desperate media dinosaur, as well as a supposed senior civil servant – who should speak with dignity for the highest office in the land but chooses to play the role of an uncouth Zanu PF zealot – have been roped in, in this disgraceful tomfoolery and assault on the media.

The well-known media dinosaur – by all accounts still deeply despised by the country’s tinpot dictatorship, including its apparatchiks at State media – is expediently being given ample space at these propaganda hubs at the moment, to do a hatchet job on the independent media, and to criminally lie about sub judice court cases involving the desperate charlatan.

In the case of the supposed senior civil servant, who played a leading role in the unjust closure of the Daily News in September 2003 for eight long years, and who bizarrely and openly boasted to journalism students in Harare a few years later about this thuggery (we have the full video tape of this and promise to release it at an appropriate time), it real is time that even the desperate powers that be realise that this scandal-ridden ruffian is a huge liability to them, never mind the country.

But we digress.

That Zimbabwe has been a mess politically and economically for most of the past 35 years of the country’s independence from Britain is not really a subject for much debate. The damning evidence is there everywhere for all to see.

Similarly, it does not require a rocket scientist to identify the real cause of the myriad man-made crises that continue to batter and traumatise long-suffering citizens: it is the ‘legendary’ misrule of Mugabe and Zanu PF — not alleged Western sanctions, “evil” whites or the country’s media and opposition.

Thus, the renewed onslaught against the Daily News and other independent media is intended to silence us, so that the hyenas in power can continue to misgovern, loot, rape and pillage the country with reckless abandon — without fear of ever being exposed.

We have news for these lowlifes. This won’t happen, certainly not on our watch. And there will be no mythical donor funds involved as we continue to expose Zimbabwe’s rot — and as the real enemies of our nascent democracy once again attempt to behead the bearer of the bad news rather than deal with the barbarians behind the rot.

It is beyond bizarre that the independent media is being blamed for all of Zimbabwe’s and Zanu PF’s problems, including the ruling party’s mindless bloodletting.

With regards to the country’s lickspittle State, they fully and embarrassingly embody the proverbial principle of “seeing no evil, hearing no evil and speaking no evil”. Turning a blind eye to, and abetting Zanu PF’s misrule is their indisputable stock-in-trade — never ever daring to question their master’s voice.

It is also the understatement of the year to say that if there are problematic areas of Zimbabwe’s media, these have always been ZBC and Zimpapers.

Surely this is not rocket science, even when one analyses the coverage of Zanu PF’s well-documented factional and succession wars by these contemptible propaganda mouthpieces, and as they mount wave after wave of despicable lies against the independent media.

Yesterday, The Herald — that grand dame of political fibs — even went to the ridiculous extent, through one of its writers, of “informing” its much lied to and abused readers that the Daily News had allegedly now moved out of Harare’s city centre to Msasa because of financial stress!

It is frankly disgusting the extent to which this regime and its minions will abuse State apparatus and lie so blatantly to long-suffering Zimbabweans in their desperate bid to extend their dying kleptocracy.

But there is method to all this madness, and it is to crush anyone and anything that threatens Zanu PF, including the independent media and imaginary ghosts!

For those who may have forgotten, our printing press was completely destroyed in a barbaric bombing in January 2001 — that was widely believed to have been carried out by State agents who were never brought to book for their dastardly act.

And finally, Mugabe’s government contrived to shut down the Daily News violently and unjustly in September 2003, after it enacted a legal instrument solely for this morbid purpose. The paper was only able to return to the market in late March 2011.

Sadly, history has recorded that some of the worst excesses of Zanu PF’s well-documented misrule of the past 35 years occurred around the time that the Daily News was out of circulation — including Operation Murambatsvina, a record hyperinflation and the vengeful murders of opposition supporters that followed Mugabe’s stunning loss to Morgan Tsvangirai in the disputed 2008 elections.

This is who these hyenas really are!