The craze for pornography was prominently covered during the past week in the Malawi press.
Dorothy Kachitsa, a reporter covering the Malawi presidency, had her nude photo circulated on the Internet. This generated a lot of headlines in the press especially as she is one of their own.
The state-run Malawi Broadcasting Corporation (MBC) had to recall Kachitsa from Lusaka, Zambia, where she was covering the Malawi President President Binguwa Mutharika at the funeral of President Levy Nwanawasa.
“MBC staff questioned over porno”, was the headline in The Daily Times which was one of the dailies to report the incident.
The paper said Kachitsa was invited to the Southern Region national Police head-quarters to be quizzed over the sleazy photos.
Kachitsa’s fate seemed to have been sealed until the powerful Information and Civic Education Minister Patricia Kaliati intervened, according to the paper.
The Nation newspaper took the sensational story a mile further, reporting, under the headline “Parliamentary employee in for porn production”, reporting that Kachitsa had revealed to the police that one of the editors of the Hansard at Parliament, Ian Mwenye, was the one who took the pictures.
Mwenye, who is married, reportedly accepted taking the pictures although he denied distributing them on the Internet.
