The country erupted into frenzied speculation when the South African Sunday Times newspaper ran a story over the weekend claiming the Reserve Bank governor Gideon Gono was having an affair with Robert Mugabe’s wife, Grace. On Behind the Headlines SW Radio Africa journalist Lance Guma speaks to New Zimbabwe.com editor Mduduzi Mathuthu who explains why the story has too many holes to be credible. Was it ethical for his website to publish the death certificate of Mugabe’s bodyguard Cain Chademana to discredit the story?

Lance Guma: Good evening Zimbabwe and welcome to Behind the Headlines. My guest this week is no stranger to the station, he’s the New Zimbabwe.com editor Mr Mduduzi Mathuthu. Mr Mathuthu thank you for joining us.

Mduduzi Mathuthu: Thank you for having me.

Guma: Now the country erupted into frenzied speculation when the South African Sunday Times newspaper ran a story over the weekend claiming the Reserve Bank governor Gideon Gono had been bedding Robert Mugabe’s wife over a five year period.

According to this story the two allegedly met as often as three times a month at Grace’s Gushungo Dairy Estate, at expensive hotels in South Africa and on foreign trips to Asia. Now we’ve got Mr Mathuthu from New Zimbabwe.com because their publication has done a very thorough story dissecting why this Sunday Times story has a lot of loopholes. Mr Mathuthu thank you for your time.

Mathuthu: Thank you.

Guma: OK first things first - why in your estimation is this story not having strong enough legs?

Mathuthu: Well I think I must to be very careful here on how you answer this sort of thing. I think from the onset I think there were only two individuals here who can really tell us whether this thing happened, whether this and that’s only Gideon Gono and Grace Mugabe.

It’s always very difficult to put yourself in a position of having to sort of deny that something of this sort happened, especially when you don’t live with those people on a day-to-day basis and you are not always with them and quite clearly I hope that sooner or later one of them will come out and tell us exactly what has been happening, deny it or tell us why this particular rumour has surfaced.

Guma: OK but I suppose all we can do as journalists of course is to piece together details of the story and see if it makes sense, which is what you did on your web site.

Mathuthu: Absolutely. I think for such a story, it’s a very big story with a lot of consequences for a lot of people who are involved in it and we were just like any other media organisation, very keen to find out what else we needed to know about this affair and the more you look at it from the details that we have, from the report that we have from the Sunday Times newspaper, the more you are really left with no other choice but to take it with a whole bunch of salt.

Guma: OK you talk about timelines in your story and why these timelines make this story hard to believe. Can we go into this and explain this to our listeners? What is it about the timeframes that doesn’t stick?

Mathuthu: Right, the Sunday Times says that President Robert Mugabe’s sister Sabina Mugabe was dying in hospital on, or received the president on the 26th of July and we are told that the president was in the company of his most trusted bodyguard, a fellow called Cain Chademana.

They say that the meeting took place between 6 and 7pm at which time the president’s sister told him that his wife had been unfaithful to him and, yes, and basically the bodyguard because he had overheard this, the Sunday Times goes on to tell us that as a consequence of that he was killed through some undetectable poison.

Of course we now know from what we have been told and what we checked and found to be true that the president on that day was actually in Uganda attending an African Union summit and according to the president before he left for Uganda on the 24th of July his sister was in a very bad shape which means basically she was in a coma and they didn’t exchange any words.

The only thing that the president was sure of was that at least she could recognise him. So quite clearly for the Sunday Times to nail itself to the mast and say this meeting happened on the 26th of July between 6 and 7pm and then we discover later, I mean any reporter who, I mean any competent journalist would have probably checked with their, after learning from a source that they say the meeting happened at that time they would have checked to have found out exactly where the president was.

And this reporter would have discovered that the president was in Uganda and therefore avoided, or perhaps cast a lot of doubt on the authenticity of the information that he was given and received and probably this story would not have made it into the paper.

Guma: Now in the Sunday Times story it was alleged that Mugabe’s bodyguard Cain Chademana was poisoned because he had admitted to the president that he knew about the affair. Now you’ve since run a story where you’ve published a copy of Chademana’s death certificate. Can you tell us more about this?

Mathuthu: Well we basically quite out of interest because the Sunday Times report said the cause of death was mysterious and so forth, I think they used the word mysterious and of course there was a suggestion of poison and so forth and I think that we obviously got a very keen interest to find out what the official version of events was and the official version of events is obviously found in a death certificate and someone’s medical history and we have contacted the hospital and they’ve provided us with some basic information about what they believe, sorry what they know that this gentleman was suffering from.

I mean they’ve obviously provided some statements signed by the medical director there which basically says that this fellow had been treated for problems like meningitis and anaemia while the death certificate says that he died of cardiac arrest, disseminated tuberculosis, pneumonia and retroviral infection which is basically a medical euphemism for HIV.

Guma: Now you do admit in your own article that you’ve received unprecedented cooperation from Zimbabwean authorities who have released these documents to you. Why do you think this has happened?

Mathuthu: Well quite clearly I, you have to believe that there’s a lot of activity in government, the Reserve Bank and everywhere, people trying to put out their version of events to try and counter the Sunday Times story and obviously when it suits them I think they can be very effective in terms of timely release of information but I guess under other circumstances trying to get this information would have been impossible.

Guma: Obviously the publication of the death certificate Mr Mathuthu raises a few other ethical issues and I’m sure even on your forums a few people have been raising this whether it was right of you to disclose somebody’s death certificate and what killed them, essentially their private medical history. How would you respond to critics who are saying you should not have done that?

Mathuthu: I do believe that there are occasions when something is of a major national importance that some information that may otherwise be withheld can be released for the benefit of the public.

If there’s an accusation that the Reserve Bank governor of the country is having an affair with the wife of the president, that’s a very serious matter and I believe that sometimes some normal routines that the media would go through can be obviously put aside for, to get the story out because we believe that it’s in the benefit, it’s in the public interest.

I do actually happen to know that the same thing happened in America when Michael Jackson died and there was a lot of interest in trying to find out what really killed Michael Jackson because the family was saying that he had been murdered.

There were a lot of Americans, people around the world, his fans, who really wanted to know what happened to Michael Jackson and the Michael Jackson death certificate is widely available on the internet so I don’t think we are the first to do this sort of thing.

It’s of course, it is very hard, you agonise over this because it’s someone’s personal information but as well it’s a major significant story I think that demands some irregular conduct on our, on the part of our reporters.

Guma: OK just to move on to one other argument that you had put in your article because was the Sunday Times had claimed former soldier Robert Mhlanga was implicated or is accused of having organised some of the meetings between Gono and the first lady.

In your article you do say if this had been the case Mhlanga would not have been rewarded with diamond mining concessions in Marange but there is some suggestion that that argument doesn’t entirely hold water because perhaps Mhlanga had already been given these concessions, so this could have happened after those concessions had been given to him.

Mathuthu: Well me and you know that with Robert Mugabe, ZANU PF, with ZANU PF you can be given one thing today and wake up without it tomorrow and I don’t think that Mr Robert Mhlanga has woken up without his diamond concessions. So the fact that he still has those interests I think quite clearly shows that there’s no movement on the side of the government to try and punish him.

So if Mr Mugabe is so violent or so angry about this that he can kill what the Sunday Times tells us is his most trusted bodyguard, what about some retired air force official who obviously is also there for the killing? So I don’t accept that the argument you presented, I don’t accept that.

Guma: So what has been happening this week in terms of the information that you are getting? There were some suggestion that there were meetings on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday – what’s been happening in terms of their response to this?

Mathuthu: We do know that the president had lunch with Gideon Gono on Monday. We of course don’t know what was discussed there but we do get the impression as well that the president is calm on the issue most probably because he knows that the said conversation with his sister didn’t take place.

But to some in ZANU PF that we’ve spoken to are saying whereas he’s unconcerned about the claims because he believes that they are false, he is also curious like everyone else. Some people close to him are very curious to find out what would give rise to these sorts of allegations and there’s certainly a suggestion, a very strong suggestion that the Reserve Bank governor was quite very close to the first lady and that closeness some believe has given rise to this thing.

And by the way we should also remember that when you are going to create a rumour sometimes for the sake of, to make it believable you obviously put some believable characters in the cast and we do know that there was no love lost between Sabina Mugabe and Grace Mugabe.

They never really saw eye to eye because Sabina Mugabe never believed that she was suited for her brother following the death of his first wife Sally Mugabe. So we also know for instance that on the 3rd of October when a memorial service was held for Sabina Mugabe, Grace Mugabe was actually absent.

She was opening some games at some disability school so that just shows you that there were personal family problems between Grace Mugabe and Robert Mugabe’s family.

Guma: OK now obviously I know it’s speculation in everything but in your estimation how do you think this story found the legs to walk into a newsroom and get published?

Mathuthu: Well quite intriguing. I guess this, I’m sure others will pick over it over many months and perhaps the Sunday Times will shed some more light on this story in the coming weeks but it’s very difficult to, it’s very hard to resist the thinking that this is part of internal dynamics in ZANU PF where people fight and they can use information leaks whether true or false to try and damage the other party and of course Gideon Gono is a major player within the ZANU PF power dynamics and perhaps someone is, he is one man who is not short of enemies so…

Guma: But has he aligned himself to any of the factions within ZANU PF and then you have one faction gunning for him because he’s belonging to this other faction?

Mathuthu: We know for sure he is aligned to Mr Mugabe and I think that is a common thread in all the ZANU PF factions, they are all aligned to the president and Gideon Gono has apparently has his own presidential ambitions and so he is aligned to himself and with the president. Same with Mujuru, he is aligned with himself and the president. Same with Mnangagwa, he is aligned with himself and the president. So they all would rather have Mugabe there than any one of them be there so…

Guma: But I’m sure they’ll obviously build alliances because we do know there’s the Emerson Mnangagwa and the Solomon Mujuru factions so people would want to know really whether Gono is aligned to any of those or if he has his own faction.

Mathuthu: Well my understanding is that the man he thinks that he is competent enough to be president and he has his own ambitions of being president so I don’t think that if you have ambitions of being president you can align yourself with someone else who has got ambitions of being president so it’s a rat race of who’s going to get there first and you should expect that the more we have, uncertainty over Mr Mugabe’s health and related issues arise the more that this is going to get dirty and possibly very violent.

Guma: And finally Mr Mathuthu interesting developments, reports suggesting the Central Intelligence Organisation sent all senior officers to meet separately with editors from the privately owned newspapers. What is said to have happened in these meetings?

Mathuthu: Well basically, the Central Intelligence there’s a suspicion that the midweek papers, I believe the Newsday specifically or the Independent which comes out on Friday were going to write, well they were going to repeat the allegations contained in the Sunday Times story and of course we know that none of the Zimbabwean newspapers have covered this story.

But I guess the only people in Zimbabwe have probably read it from internet news sites and heard it from SW Radio yourselves and maybe from satellite from South African TV stations. So the CIO is very keen to protect this information from being widely available in the country and we understand that they called editors from the, those two newspapers and basically advised them that if they did run that information they should be prepared for the consequences and the consequences of that they were told quite clearly that you could be killed.

Guma: So it’s safe to assume none of the local papers are going to cover this story any time soon?

Mathuthu: No we can be very sure unless if someone has got a death wish. I don’t know but I guess that if the editors in Zimbabwe have a very simple choice - to be dead heroes or living cowards and I’ve a pretty good idea that most of them would rather be living cowards. And in any case the story itself as presented by the Sunday Times in the last week leaves so much doubt that it’s not a risk worth taking for the editors.

Guma: Dead heroes or living cowards – parting words there from the New Zimbabwe.com editor Mduduzi Mathuthu who joined us on Behind the Headlines. Mr Mathuthu thank you so much for your time.

Mathuthu: Thank you Mr Guma.

You can listen to the programme here: http://swradioafrica.streamuk.com/swradioafrica_archive/bth281010.wma

Feedback can be sent to lance@swradioafrica.com or http://twitter.com/lanceguma

SW Radio Africa is Zimbabwe’s Independent Voice and broadcasts on Short Wave 4880 KHz in the 60m band.