Veteran newsman Geoffrey Nyarota dies

HARARE – Veteran journalist Geoffrey Nyarota who edited The Chronicle and The Daily News died from colon cancer at the age of 74 on Saturday.

Tributes have been paid to Nyarota, whose work exposing the Willowgate scandal in 1989 while editing The Chronicle made him one of the most consequential journalists of his generation.

“Geoff was a pioneering investigative journalist who will be missed by family and friends. He battled cancer valiantly for a long time,” Alpha Media Holdings publisher Trevor Ncube said.

Information secretary Ndavaningi Mangwana wrote on: “Saddened by the loss of Zimbabwean media giant Geoff Nyarota. As a pioneering editor, he left an indelible mark on the country’s journalism landscape. His contributions to investigative journalism and robust public discourse will be remembered.”

Brezhnev Malaba, a former editor of The Chronicle, said Nyarota’s work “inspired many.”

“Some criminals he exposed in the 1980s are still masquerading as political leaders — and this impunity explains why Zimbabwe has been destroyed by catastrophic corruption,” Malaba said.

Born in 1951 in Harare, Nyarota started off as a teacher and joined The Rhodesian Herald as a trainee in 1978. He was promoted to editor of Manica Post in Mutare.

In 1983, Nyarota was appointed editor of The Chronicle in Bulawayo as the government deployed troops to crack down on what it said was a dissident menace – former independence war fighters from ZPRA who had refused integration into the regular army and were allegedly terrorising farmers and villagers in the countryside.

Nyarota was criticised over his paper’s failure to expose the widespread killings that followed, with rights groups estimating over 20,000 mainly Ndebele speakers were killed by soldiers.

The Chronicle and its sister paper, The Sunday News, were accused of running editorials cheering on the 5th Brigade, the army unit whose atrocities came to be known as Gukurahundi.

In 1989, Nyarota came to national prominence after exposing Willowgate, a scandal in which senior government officials in President Robert Mugabe had been given early access to buy cars at an assembly plant in Willowvale wholesale, which they later resold at a 200 percent profit.

Five ministers resigned in the aftermath of that investigation but Nyarota also lost his job and spent years teaching journalism in South Africa.

In 1999, he founded The Daily News whose impactful reporting and investigations amid rising public disaffection with the government quickly made it the biggest circulation daily newspaper.

In 2000, a bomb was thrown at the newspaper’s offices in Harare and a year later The Daily News’ printing press was destroyed in a bomb, which Nyarota blamed on agents of President Mugabe.

In 2001, the Committee to Protect Journalists awarded Nyarota its International Press Freedom Award, which recognizes journalists who show courage in defending press freedom despite facing attacks, threats, or imprisonment.

The World Association of Newspapers awarded him its Golden Pen of Freedom Award in 2002. That same year he was also awarded UNESCO’s Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize.

On December 30, 2002, Nyarota resigned as editor of the Daily News, to avoid his firing by the paper’s new executive chairman. The paper was shut down by the government in September 2003.

Nyarota moved to the United States where he got a fellowship at Harvard University and wrote his first book, ‘Against the Grain, Memoirs of a Zimbabwean Newsman.’

He also ran a shortlived online newspaper, The Zimbabwe Times.

Nyarota would return home and in 2013 he led a commission of enquiry into the state of the media in Zimbabwe.

In 2018, he published a book ‘The Graceless Fall of Robert Mugabe: The End of a Dictator’s Reign’ which was followed by his third book ‘The Honourable Minister: An Anatomy of Endemic Corruption’ in 2022.

His battle with cancer took a toll on his finances and in December 2024 friends launched an initiative to raise funds to cover his ongoing treatment.

Nyarota is survived by his wife Ursula, and three children.

Zimlive