Trevor Ncube looks back at covering and surviving Zimbabwe's tough years

After Mugabe formed a power-sharing government in 2008 with his rival, Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, that was meant to tackle an economic and political crisis, including opening up the media industry, Ncube decided to publish the country's first private daily, NewsDay in 2010.

But the entrepreneur whose passport was seized in 2005 in what many saw as a government drive to silence critics says even today, being a journalist in Zimbabwe is not easy.

"We think that our role is to play a role in building a new Zimbabwe that all Zimbabweans are going to be proud of, and certain instances that means taking a very hard look at a how all the political players are performing around issues of transparency, accountability, human rights and issues of corruption. And those that are in government, whether it's the 2 MDC factions or ZANU PF tend to be very uncomfortable," said Ncube.

Although the government has licensed four private newspapers, Zimbabwe still has no private radio or television station, and has been criticized for trying to muzzle press freedom.

Ncube a trained economist left his job as a lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe to join the Financial Gazette in 1989 and later took up a job as an editor at the Zimbabwe Independent. He later bought the paper and started other sister publications.

The businessman says he wants to create more employment and attract advertisers in an economy that has been ravaged by hyperinflation and unemployment of around 80 percent.

"Our production costs has escalated particularly over the past 3 to 4 years, and we are doing this in an environment where dollarization has seen costs in many instances go up all across the board, you know our human capital costs have gone up, like I said our printing costs have gone up, so its very tough to do business, particularly to do publishing business in Zimbabwe, but I am glad to say that we have been able to survive the difficult times," said Ncuba.

Since 2009, Zimbabwe has been recovering from a decade of decline, and the economy remains fragile with coalition government partners bickering over policy.

Andrew Moyse is the project coordinator at Media Monitoring Project, Zimbabwe and says it's generally difficult to run a media company in the current environment.

"Well, from an economic point of view, its quite a problem because the economy is so broken, you got limited advertising, people, I think there is an 85 percent unemployment rate, people find it difficult, expensive to buy newspapers on a regular basis, it's not like a normal environment, so from an economic point of view it's also quite difficult to make it a commercial success," he said.

Ncube has been recognized for his efforts and has won various awards including the prestigious German Africa Award which recognizes African personalities who have contributed towards promoting peace, democracy and human rights.

Iden Wetherell, is Ncuba's colleague at Alpha Media Holdings.

"Well, he is a dedicated journalist, he is self taught he didn't come as a professional journalist to journalism, he was self taught, he learnt it as he went along and quite successfully picked up the skills of journalism as he went along over the years until now where he is a first class journalist as well as a businessman," said Wetherell.

Ncube says his plan is to expand to other regions of the continent and use new opportunities to champion press freedom across Africa.