GEOFF Nyarota, of the Willowgate fame, boasts that he is an acclaimed multiple award-winning journalist, newspaper editor and media entrepreneur, as well as campaigner for human rights.
Among the accolades he boasts are: The Committee to Protect Journalists International Press Freedom Award; the UNESCO Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize for 2002 and the World Association of Newspapers Golden Pen of Freedom Award.
However, what one finds curious about all these awards is that they are all Western-sponsored.
In 2001, the American New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists awarded Nyarota the International Press Freedom Award purportedly in recognition of his show of ‘courage in defending press freedom despite facing attacks, threats or imprisonment’.
The Committee was purportedly founded ‘to promote press freedom and defend the rights of journalists,’ and, its modus operandi includes organising public protests to effect regime changes.
It is worth noting that Nyarota’s American cheerleaders have never made it a secret that they are anti-Zimbabwe and, in that regard, it would be naïve to imagine them rewarding a black person for being ‘proudly Zimbabwean’ and patriotic to the nationalist ideals of Zimbabwe.
They never honoured ZANU PF for fighting the liberation war and redistributing land from exclusive white minority ownership to the landless black majority.  
For pulling the stupendous human rights feat, Zimbabwe was ironically awarded the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act (ZDERA) which former US President George Bush signed into law on December 21 2001 following Nyarota’s International Press Freedom Award.
And, it was not sheer coincidence, but racist design.
Nyarota’s Daily News provided the alarmist demonisation that was used to justify the illegal sanctions against Zimbabwe.
Earlier in the year, the bill had been proposed by US Senators, Bill Frist and Russ Feingold, and it had been sponsored by Jesse Helms, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden all of whom are irredeemable racists.
The world is called upon to remember how Hillary Clinton danced in celebration of the street murder of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi by Western sponsored militia.
Her words were: “We came.
“We saw.
“He died.”
Another interesting fact worth noting is that among the sponsors of the Committee to Protect Journalists are the CNBC, the CNN and Fox News, all of which have consistently published harmful and racist falsehoods against Zimbabwe.
The CNN, in particular, has consistently portrayed Zimbabwe as a ‘silenced land,’ in which Nyarota is ‘a defiant voice’ and a fearless critic of President Robert Mugabe.
And, the curious thing is that the celebrated ‘defiant voice’ in a silenced land, is deafeningly silent on how the American ZDERA is a racist violation of United Nations consensus and international rule of law against interference in Zimbabwe’s domestic affairs worse let alone in order to restore exclusive racist white settler privilege.
However, it is the composition of the board of directors for the Committee to Protect Journalists that ultimately gives away the International Press Freedom Award as a mercenary award given to mercenary journalists for advancing racist Western interests; a dog leash designed to restrain genuine press freedom in sovereign African states, by bribing mercenary journalists not to report African crises in their relevant and informative historical contexts.  
Over the years, the directors have included the importunately racist Christiane Amanpour whose one-time interview with President Robert Mugabe epitomised the insolent disrespect which Western media practitioners have for all African sovereignty.  
Her ignorance of the history of the crisis in Zimbabwe was so shocking that President Mugabe had to remind her: “Don’t forget it was my party which brought democracy into Zimbabwe and not the British.
“We had to fight the British for democracy for one man, one person, one vote!”
In 1988 Nyarota rose to fame after exposing the Willowvale scandal in which Government ministers were abusing a Government vehicle acquisition facility to enrich themselves.
It became coined the ‘Willowgate Scandal’ after the American Watergate scandal that brought down US President Richard Nixon.
Nyarota’s allusion to ‘Watergate’ suggested an editor very much informed by history, an editor you would expect, in seeking other achievements, to be intelligent enough to locate ‘Watergate’ in the age of Black American Civil Rights Movements that had seen the defiant voices of Malcom X and Martin Luther King being silenced by guns fired by defiant white racists.
You would also expect him to know that the man who murdered Malcolm X was caught on his way to Rhodesia where he believed Ian Smith was doing a good thing – killing blacks.
In retrospect, it turns out that Nyarota’s ‘Willowgate’ was just a chance ‘flash of genius’ that was tragically misread to represent real genius and real bravery. 
Time has fortunately turned the media ‘error of judgment’ into a blessing in disguise by exposing shocking discrepancies between the achievements for which Nyarota is celebrated by the erstwhile colonisers and the longer historical context in which he is supposed to be ‘a defiant voice’ in a silenced land.
And, while many have argued that perhaps Nyarota does not even know that he is a sell-out, the exposed discrepancies overwhelmingly define a confident ‘super-sellout’.

l To be continued