MUTARE – Veteran journalist Geoffrey Nyarota, who was the founding editor of the then independent Daily News, has died from colon cancer at the age of 74.
A towering figure in Zimbabwean journalism, Nyarota reportedly passed away on Saturday around 8pm at the Murambi Garden Clinic in Mutare.
As editor of the State owned Chronicle newspaper in the 80’s, Nyarota played a prominent role in exposing the Willowgate Scandal that involved the illegal resale of vehicles purchases by various government officials. Five ministers were forced to resign.
Leading the tributes was Alpha Media Holdings publisher Trevor Ncube who said; “Geoff was a pioneering investigative journalist who will be missed by family and friends. He battled cancer valiantly for a long time.”
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.
During his editorship of the Daily News, Nyarota was arrested six times.
On 1 August 2000, it was reported that Zimbabwe’s secret police, the Central Intelligence Organisation, had sent a man named Bernard Masara to kill Nyarota; however, after meeting Nyarota in a lift, Masara changed his mind and warned him of the plot.
Masara then called his employer with the paper’s editors listening so that they could verify the source of the plan.
In 2003, Nyarota and his family fled to South Africa and later to the United States. There, Nyarota was awarded a fellowship at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. He also taught journalism classes at Bard College.
In 2006, he released his first book, Against the Grain. The memoir tells of his experiences as a schoolteacher in Rhodesia and later as a journalist under Mugabe’s rule.
From exile, he also began the website www.thezimbabwetimes.com, describing Internet news as the “loophole” in Zimbabwean government censorship.
Last year in December, Nyarota’s battle with cancer was highlighted and friends launched an initiative to raise funds to cover his ongoing treatment.
Nyarota is survived by his wife Ursula and three children, Tafirenyika, Itayi and Rufaro.
MHSRIP……..!