Newspaper proliferates fake reports

by DANAI MWARUMBA 
HARARE, (CAJ News) – YET another Zimbabwean newspaper has been caught in a fake news storm after falsifying a court case.

The false report by Newsday on a case involving businessman, Frank Buyanga, is the latest in the proliferation of fake news targeting political parties, politicians and business-people.

Last Friday, the newspaper wrote, “Businessman Frank Buyanga has been banned from making property transfers in Zimbabwe by the Attorney-General’s office after several complaints of people losing their properties surrendered as surety for loans, the court heard.”

Yet in reality, the Attorney General’s (AG) office cleared Buyanga cleared of wrongdoing in the probe.

In statement to Zimbabwe’s leading daily, The Herald, the AG’s office wrote, “A few years ago we carried out some investigations on him but we discovered that these people who had approached our offices had borrowed money from Mr Buyanga and were only trying to find a way of not paying him back the money.”

The statement said further read, “We even went to the extent of denying to prosecute him since there was no case against him. Mr Buyanga is, however, not blacklisted from making property transfers. There is nothing like that.”

Newsday went on to report that the registrar of deeds, Ellen Mawire told magistrate Hosea Mujaya that it could not be possible for the accused Bishop Jeche to have title deeds of a property he bought from Buyanga after 2010 as Buyanga was prohibited from transacting any property transfers.

This again was incorrect.

On Thursday, this is what actually Ellen Mawire told the court.

She testified that Buyanga, who has been again wrongly accused of an alleged fraudulent house sale, was, in fact, the legal property owner of the property.

According to Mawire, title deeds held at her office in respect of the
property in question were legally registered in Buyanga’s name but the registrar had rejected a defaulting client (Bishop Jeche’s) who is now the accused person’s attempt to transfer the property into his name.

– CAJ News