Zvayi was sobbing as they loaded his bags
Ceaser Zvayi,the former editor of The Herald was not the same rapid wordsmith who openly celebrated the violent crackdown on the opposition in Zimbabwe when police came to pick him up in an open truck at his campus office on Friday afternoon. All he could say visibly holding back tears was,’You people don’t understand.’
Zvayi was given his contract termination letter on Thursday night by the Head of Media Studies Department, Professor David Kerr. Last week Kerr has indicated that Zvayi’s ideology was, “an issue of concern”.
The university finally succumbed to pressure after students taking Writing for Print and News Writing and Reporting 1 in the university’s Faculty of Communications and Media, started boycotting his lectures in protest after Metro broke the story two weeks ago.
Students at the university were set to be joined by Zimbabweans residing in Gaborone to stage a protest at the campus on Monday.Anti-Mugabe sentiments are particularly strong among Botswana citizens and the Botswana government has taken a particular hard line stance against Mugabe.
The development comes as reports say students at the University of Zimbabwe are augmenting their lecturers’ salaries. Zvayi could have stood to earn more than 8000 Pula a month as a lecturer at the University of Botswana,a salary a full professor at any university in Zimbabwe can only dream of.
Zvayi has in the past openly called for the alienation of the opposition and celebrated the violent crackdown on the opposition in that country, he is well know for bastardizing the MDC acronym to mean Movement for the Destruction of our Country, sometimes with the ascetic ‘movement’ for ‘morons’. Last year he used a racial slur against the US Ambassador calling him a “house Ni***r”.
Alongside Sunday Mail’s Munyaradzi Huni became the first journalist to be added to the European Union travel restrictions on Zimbabwe.
He is accused of propagating hate speech in an updated list of 37 individuals and 4 ‘entities’ under a visa ban and assets freeze. They are accused of whipping up support during a state sponsored terror campaign during and after the June 29 controversial run off election.
Posted by Mellisa Dube-Koketso
on August 8, 2008. Filed under Local News.
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