By Correspondent
Harare, Zimbabwe (News of The South) – I was the first journalist to move to contact the musician Alick Macheso right at the onset after the video which got the nation talking the whole day on Tuesday.
Journalists do not rush to publish anything before thorough checks, and this is what I and others set off to do following other stories that I have done on the man for 8 years to date in which his conduct has been checkered, one which involves a minor less than 5 years old, and two which involve women in their 20s. I have had exclusive video recorded interviews with him for several years.
In the video is a man bedding a female reported to be an underage. The constitution and the laws of Zimbabwe pertaining safeguarding of young citizens as well as vulnerable adults puts an obligation on all citizens not just journalists, the burden and vigilance on such cases, even if this was based on mere suspicion, if that were the case.
The first checks before even contacting the musician, were to verify if this video was doctored, and crawlers were used to trace its origins. Crawlers checking its metadata found no foreign origin or trace. After this, a frame by frame analysis was conducted.
The next step was to phone the man himself, and a male aide, answered his phone and said “Macheso is not around, he will only be back on Friday.” The aide was told that there is an emergency relating to the viral-video but to this, the response was it is not possible, “he (Macheso) will only return on Friday.”
He was asked for a direct phone number and the manager replied saying he was going to call Macheso and inform him.
After this, a band member Jethro was contacted over the matter and notified that he was not with Macheso. Another word was dropped to him raising the urgency of the matter.
Towards the end, at around 3.46pm, Macheso’s other manager, Tich Makahamadze was contacted. Tich, as he is popularly known, responded with a promise that the singer would be ready to respond in 30-minutes. By 4:30 p.m, the musician was to comment on the video matter, or at the least deny it.
Tich announced saying Macheso has received the video and will respond. Within 10 seconds of saying that, he changed statements to say Macheso has not yet received the video, it is him and other colleagues who have, and who will respond later.
Tich did not fulfil his promise and continued to say Macheso is nowhere to be seen.
2-hours later, Macheso was contacted once again, and Tich picking up the phone repeated the same statements saying Macheso will speak later. This time he said the woman in the video is not a child.
He said “is this your child? Where did you get the age?,” he said.
At the end of the night Tuesday, Macheso was still to comment.
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