HARARE, ZIMBABWE — The newspaper consists of a small office with one authentically untidy desk and one bare but for a borrowed laptop. A couple of chairs. Newspapers and papers stacked on the floor. And Boss Barns.
That would be Barnabas Thondhlana, one of Zimbabwe's best-known newspapermen. He sits at the messy desk, explaining the vague order in the various piles. The big one is job applications, hundreds of them. The ones he doesn't like (including those of four former state spies) get thrown onto the floor. The ones he does like go into several piles on the desk and floor.
Boss Barns, as he's fondly known to his colleagues and drinking pals at the Quill Club, was there on the day in 2003 when armed police shut down the country's last independent daily paper, the Daily News. They ordered the journalists out and put a padlock as big as his hand on the front door.
Now the affable 47-year-old is about to launch an independent daily, NewsDay. It's the first major test of news media freedom under Zimbabwe's new government of national unity, which was set up in a political compromise after President Robert Mugabe and his ZANU-PF party lost elections last year but refused to give up power.
No launch date has been set for NewsDay. The big question mark is whether the Ministry of Media, Information and Publicity, controlled by hard-line Mugabe loyalists, will give the paper an operating license.
Trevor Ncube, NewsDay backer and owner of the Zimbabwe Independent, a weekly, and South Africa's Mail and Guardian, said he had spoken to government ministers from all sides. "I haven't received a single indication that there's somebody who doesn't want us to be licensed," he said in an interview at his office in Johannesburg, South Africa.
His aim is to produce a newspaper trusted not only by ZANU-PF but also by its erstwhile partner in the unity government, the Movement for Democratic Change, or MDC.
"We need a newspaper that says it's OK to disagree. The fact that I disagree doesn't mean that I should wish you dead. That's the environment we have come from," said Ncube, who describes himself as an idealist.
The Daily News was the first big independent daily in Zimbabwe, where state-controlled and subsidized news media such as the Herald voiced the ruling party line. With the slogan "Telling It Like It Is," cheeky cartoons and investigative reports on corruption and abuses, the Daily News saw its circulation soar to more than 100,000.
