Financial Times
By Tony Hawkins in Harare
Published: August 5 2007 18:23
A new law in Zimbabwe allowing the state to tap private phone conversations
and monitor faxes and e-mails is unconstitutional and impracticable, said
local lawyers, opposition politicians and internet service providers.
Lawyers said they are confident the government’s Interception of
Communications Act which became law last week can be challenged successfully
in the courts.
The act empowers President Robert Mugabe’s government to establish an
information centre to eavesdrop on telephone conversations, open mail and
intercept faxes and e-mails.
The government said it is justified by the need to combat domestic and
international terrorism as well as “economic sabotage”. The law merely puts
its anti-terrorism legislation in line with international practice, it says.
The act requires ISPs to purchase and install equipment to spy on their
clients’ communications “when so required”. ISPs must also ensure that they
have the capacity to monitor communications full-time.
One ISP executive, who did not wish to be named, said: “All the equipment
has to be imported, and we do not have foreign currency for that.” Most ISPs
would have to close if the authorities enforced the legislation, he said.
Media houses believe the government will use the law to curb critical
reporting of the country’s rapidly worsening social and economic crisis. The
authorities are particularly anxious to clamp down on online news services
that are read increasingly widely in Zimbabwe, government critics said.
David Coltart, secretary for legal affairs in the Mutambara wing of the
opposition Movement for Democratic Change, said the law was unconstitutional
and “an unjustifiable invasion of a person’s rights”. He said lack of
foreign currency meant the government did not have the capacity to
implement the legislation.
But Beatrice Mtetwa, president of the Zimbabwe Law Society, said she
believed the government had been intercepting communications before the bill
became law. “The act simply legalises what they have already been doing,”
she said.
In a separate development the state-owned Sunday Mail newspaper said on
Sunday that Zimbabwe’s wheat crop was likely to meet only 20 per cent of
national requirements. The production target for 2007 is 338,000 tonnes but
output is unlikely to exceed much more than 70,000 tonnes according to
industry sources.
Farmers said production had been disrupted by last season’s drought which
hit the irrigation of the winter wheat crop as well as “constant power cuts”
and vandalism of irrigation equipment.
Some farmers had been without power for four days at a time.
Zimbabwe is already desperately short of food, with the United Nations’
World Food Programme warning that as many as 4m people – or about 40 per
cent of the population – will need food aid in the first half of 2008.