The Financial Gazette

SINCE independence in 1980, a number of strategies have been hatched by successive boards that presided over the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation — renamed the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Holdings (ZBH) following its unbundling into several strategic business units nearly a decade ago in failed attempts to transform its performance from being a perennial loss-maker that unashamedly suckles from the drying nipples of a sickly Treasury — into a self-sustaining business that contributes revenue to the same.

But despite these well-intentioned action plans and programmes, the situation at ZBH has not improved. In fact, if the truth be told, the parastatal has plumped to its lowest ebb as it continues to feed from hand to mouth month on end despite its pseudo-monopoly on the airwaves.
The cathartic failure of the various survival strategies to breathe life into the potentially money-spinning monolith is an indictment on all that has gone wrong at Pockets Hill, more importantly its failure to pitch its content to levels desired by its listeners and viewers so that whatever is broadcast into the airwaves, becomes good food to the ear and eyes.
While the ZANU-PF element in the inclusive government, which is pulling the strings at the public broadcaster, may be happy to forego a dividend in return for mileage, the status quo at the parastatal is clearly doing more harm than good to ZBH itself.
It is not only the goodwill that is being eroded by its reckless bias in its coverage of news as well as its atrocious programming. A lot more is at stake.
Very soon ZBH might find its viewership and listenership declining to zero unless if there is sea change in the manner its gatekeepers and handlers are handling the affairs at Pockets Hill, which should be doing a lot more to prop up the film industry in Zimbabwe like what other African countries such as Nigeria and South Africa are doing.
Last week ZBH proved once again that no matter how Zimbabweans can shout on top of their voices, the parastatal cares less about its viewers and listeners.
Instead of taking its listeners and viewers as the dip stick that should inform the type of programmes to be flighted on television or aired on radio, ZBH proved beyond any reasonable doubt that it would go to any lengths to spite its clientele.
Typical of the arrogance at other hopeless parastatals in Zimbabwe that show utter disrespect of the same public they are supposed to serve, ZBH has taken it upon itself to feed its viewers and listeners a constant diet of propaganda jingles reminiscent of the hondo yeminda type that were played on radio and television with reckless abandon.
The idea is obviously to prop up President Robert Mugabe and his ZANU-PF party — the dominant partner in the inclusive government — at the expense of Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai and his Movement for Democratic Change (MDC-T) formation and other dissenting voices.
ZBH, for whatever reason, has been doing this in complete disregard of the Global Political Agreement (GPA) signed between President Robert Mugabe, Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai and Deputy Prime Minister Arthur Mutambara in September 2008 which clearly spells out what is expected of it.
Article XIX of the GPA states in part that “. . . steps be taken to ensure that the public media provides balanced and fair coverage to all political parties for their legitimate political activities . . . that the public and private media refrain from using abusive language that may incite hostility, political intolerance and ethnic hatred or that unfairly undermines political parties and other organisations. To this end, the inclusive government shall ensure that appropriate measures are taken to achieve this objective.”
To ZBH, all these niceties are not worth the paper they are written on.
Its coverage has neither been fair nor balanced. ZBH has instead gone into an overdrive to fan hatred and undermine the MDC-T in particular using the taxpayer’s money.
ZBH’s attitude and the perilous direction it has taken is worrying.
The national broadcaster has become a threat to itself and the single largest stumbling block to the sustainability of the GPA, which has been sitting on shifting sands due to ZANU-PF’s prevarication over the so-called outstanding issues.
Public broadcasters worldwide promote national programmes, in this case the road-map outlined by the coalition, not sectional interests. They must also commit themselves to nation building and national interests and yet ZBH is turning itself into a merchant of divisions, intolerance and hatred at the rate only unparalleled by Joseph Goebbels, the late Germany politician and Reich Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany.
The jingles, which also run up against the spirit of national healing, reconciliation and integration being promoted at the very top by none other than the three principals to the GPA, are heightening tensions at a time when the mood countrywide is explosive due to the friction characterising the constitution-making process.
Could it be that ZBH has turned itself into a willing tool of hardliners working day and night to get the constitutional outreach programme off the rails and deny Zimbabweans a chance to write their own constitution to replace the colonial Lancaster House document adopted in 1979?
Ironically, President Mugabe himself has, on countless occasions, preached about unity, unity and more unity and yet ZBH, which falls under the aegis of a ZANU-PF ministry, is behaving like a loose cannon in disregard of the Banjul Declaration on the Principles of Freedom of Expression in Africa and the basic tenets of journalism.
While a Supreme Court ruling of September 2000 quashed ZBH’s monopoly, the powers-that-be have used every trick in the book to maintain the public broadcaster’s supremacy on the airwaves in order to serve sectional and parochial interests and not the common good of Zimbabweans who, since the setting up of the Broadcasting Authority of Zimbabwe about a decade ago, have waited and waited hoping to see an alternative medium that serves their interests.
Attempts to spring up a truly professional outfit that competes with the nauseating and inefficient ZBH have been quashed with the vigour of a hungry lion pursuing a hapless antelope as exemplified by the closure of Capitol Radio in 2000 and the switching off of James Makamba’s Joy TV in 2002.
Can one then blame the Prime Minister for resorting to innovative ways to get his views and programmes across?
But while the powers-that-be can continue to use the hammer to close the media space by hook or crook, technological advancement is defeating their cause and sooner rather than later, they will realise that theirs is an exercise in futility.
By disregarding the wishes of the viewers and the listening public and pandering to the whims of its partisan handlers, ZBH is digging its own grave. Very soon it will hand over the little cake that has been keeping it going to DStv, other pre-paid channels and pirate radio stations beaming into the country.
The advice to Media, Information and Publicity Minister, Webster Shamu, is that he must make a clear distinction between his role as a Cabinet minister and that of being ZANU-PF’s political commissar.
Reducing ZBH into a ZANU-PF project or mouthpiece is certainly not a wise idea, particularly at this juncture in the country’s history when efforts are currently underway to heal the fractured nation.
At the rate ZBH is going, viewers and advertisers may be tempted to vent their frustrations by withholding payment of license fees and slashing advertising budgets to the barest minimum in order to hit the parastatal where it hurts most, i.e., the pocket.

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