Popular award winning Zimbabwean journalist, Hopewell Chin’ono publicly accused fellow journalist Simba Chikanza of running a three-year-long campaign of lies and harassment against him, calling him a “pathetic loser” and “nasty, evil hearted man.” Chin’ono alleges that Chikanza has engaged in unhinged behavior, including slandering the late Dr. Alex Magaisa and harassing institutions that have invited Chin’ono to speak. He claims that a legal case for defamation and malicious lies is being investigated by two police forces in the UK, Nottingham and Leeds, and that a collaborator of Chikanza’s was previously warned by police to stop tweeting about him. Chin’ono concludes by asserting that Chikanza and his associates are “absolute failures” who live off benefits and feed on “envy, bitterness, and manufactured scandals” to gain relevance by targeting big names.
Writing on Facebook, Hopewell said:
Simba Chikanza is a pathetic loser. I knew this long ago when the late Dr Alex Magaisa told me how ZimEye was started and warned us to stay away.
He once stood outside Dr Magaisa’s Kent University streaming live slandering him with lies until the police intervened. That is the level of unhinged behaviour we are dealing with.
For three years he has run a campaign of lies against me. I stopped announcing my movements because he would harass institutions that invited me to speak. He is a nasty, evil hearted man.
The fact that over half a million Zimbabweans follow Zimeye on Twitter says a lot about us. He has recruited other failures to run smear spaces packed with lies.
He worked with someone called Salani who was called in by Nottingham Police after spreading lies about me abusing women. She pleaded with them, citing immigration issues and how prosecution would affect her.
I could hear my late mother’s voice reminding me that vengeance is not mine when Nottingham police called me to ask whether we should proceed to prosecution because they said the evidence was overwhelming, so I chose restraint. She was told never to tweet about me again according to Notts Police.
The law moves slowly, yet it moves. With Simba there will be no such mercy. In the United Kingdom you do not slander people and walk away, there is always a price for defamation and malicious lies.
His case has been slow because it is two police forces doing the investigations, Nottingham and Leeds. The guy is so demonic that he was phoning Zimbabweans I worked with at the BBC asking if they had any dirty on me! Now he also runs the Baba Jukwa Facebook page where he repeats his nonsense!
The common denominator with all these failures is that they live off benefits, they are absolute failures who have achieved nothing with their lives, and the only way they scrape for relevance is by targeting big names. They feed off envy, bitterness, and manufactured scandals because without attaching themselves to others, they are invisible.
