Thinking about what Zim could and should do with its media
May 4th, 2008
The prospect of a change of government in Zimbabwe provides an opportunity to reshape that country’s media along democratic lines.
Last time Zimbabwe went through major political change – independence in 1980 – the colonial media system was simply transferred to the new state and continued to play a partisan role as the new government became increasingly repressive. Robert Mugabe’s government kept a stranglehold on broadcast media and took over the major newspapers from the then Argus Group of South Africa. It built up a machinery of media control, forcing the registration of journalists and publications and using this – and more direct repression - to suppress opposition voices.
Private newspapers were given very little space in which to operate in the last decade or so, and most were closed down. The country has had no independent mass-market dailies for the last few years.
This in a country with a high literacy rate and strong demand for reading material. The absence of a free media contributed significantly to the delay in bringing democratic change.
That the opposition has been able to win parliament in a situation where they have had almost no media platform, and faced the naked hostility of powerful state media, is a remarkable achievement.
On the other hand, this led to a lively media-in-exile, particularly on the internet, which has played a significant role in keeping information flowing in, out and around the country. Newspapers, radio stations and internet sites proliferated on foreign soil. Much of the opposition communication has also been via SMS, another new technology hard for the state to control. In the words of my colleague, Tawana Kupe, “Zimbabweans have become masters of alternative communication and media strategies as surrogates for mainstream media�.
Now there will be important choices to make to rebuild and secure democracy. The first step will be dismantling the legal and state machinery which controls and contains the media. Most of it, such as the state-appointed Media Council, and the security laws, can simply be done away with.
New institutions, such as an independent broadcasting regulator, will need to be put in place. Such moves should allow for a blossoming of private media, hopefully this time extended to radio and television.
A mistake, however, would be simply to privatise state-controlled media. The need for diversity will not be served if such a large and dominant group is simply sold off to a new owner, reproducing the imbalances inherited from the colonial era.
The government could break up the state media group, though they would have to be careful to ensure the bits and pieces remain viable under what will be tough economic conditions for some time at least.
They could also try and convert it to a true public service media, relinquishing control over the trust and ensuring it falls into the hands of the great, the good and the truly independent.
We know from the South African experience that this can be difficult to achieve. It is one thing to create the right policies and structures, but it is another to immunise the structures from the interference of the ruling party and other powerful political and economic interests. This requires trustees and board members who are truly dedicated to protecting and preserving the media’s independence and prepared to stand up to all of those who will inevitably try to compromise it.
Some of the world’s greatest newspapers are owned by trusts, such as the Guardian and the Economist, and they have proven to be structures which can allow for quality media that enjoys a greater independence than those in private or listed companies.
I would hope that the new Zimbabwe government goes for a basket of media reforms: opening up the private media sector, privatising some state media, putting the rest in a well-insulated public service trust.
A new government should also invest in a broadband network which will give widespread internet access across the country. That will not just open things up, and empower people, but ensure that in the future it will be much harder for any authority to control information the same way again.
*This first appeared in Business Day, 30 April 2008
Entry Filed under: Anton Harber, Journalism, Media regulation
1 Comment Add your own
1. Marilyn Keegan | May 15th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
See what journalists there are saying….May 13 2008
By Peta Thornycroft
It feels as if this story will never end. That we will never sleep again, that the tension will never ease, that the cruelty will know no bounds. That evil will prevail.
The communication problems are so bad that it feels as if we will never get the story out and never get it right either.
In communal areas telecommunications are the same as they were during Southern Rhodesia. And that is where most of the violence is happening.
So how do we get information? With the utmost difficulty. Are we exaggerating? No we are not. That is those of us who are accountable and write for mainstream media. Do we get information wrong? Yes, sometimes.
The police won’t speak to us, except, occasionally if they answer the landlines at Police General Headquarters in Harare. Then they deny everything, or say they don’t have any information, but mostly they are unavailable.
Their mobile phones? Occasionally we might get through if we hit redial 25 times and the call stays live for longer than 10 seconds. Police won’t or can’t confirm or deny anything on their mobile or landlines.
Hospital phones go unanswered too, or staff won’t say anything, or there is no one available, or if there is, they certainly don’t want to speak to journalists.
The informal network of information between the rural areas and towns is largely broken as there are so few buses travelling and because it is too expensive for people to go “kumusha” (home).
Rather like the Stasi in the old GDR (German Democratic Republic), there is an enormous network of informers. Many are not evil, just doing something to earn a little.
So we have to be careful when we look for the evidence we need, and we ask questions carefully, nonchalantly, as if we are not really interested. We will stop at a roadside shop, looking for a cool drink. Stupid really, since there is nothing in any of these shops. Nothing to sell. Nothing to buy.
Mostly the road blocks are just that, a time-wasting stop, where the police couldn’t care less who we are or what we are doing and wave us through. But just in case, we have to be ready with a bunch of half truths.
Just in case.
It is always “just in case”.
We get caught because we are at the wrong place at the wrong time, not because the CIO (Central Intelligence Organisation) are smart.
If they wanted to, they could catch all of us all the time.
Somebody at the top decides it is time to catch the journalists, so there is a spurt.
Like Monday a week ago, when they went around from lodge to lodge looking for journalists. They had two names. Derek Watts (Carte Blanche) and Kate Adie, (BBC retired). Both had been in Harare about 2002 or 2003 as we recall.
Sometimes journalists get caught because they relax, lulled into forgetting that Zimbabwe is, more or less a police state.
At first glance it looks okay - nice, even. Orderly. Not as dirty as Johannesburg. Polite people, not starving. Police quite smart. Army too, although a lot are hitch-hiking these days. No guns going off, no bombs, no military parades, no military aircraft and the only choppers are those flying President Mugabe or the smaller one carrying super rich Billy Rautenbach. So no frightening overhead noise.
In Harare’s northern suburbs the rich still go out to dinner, but the menus have shrunk, restaurants are pretty empty and thin young men selling flowers in pot-holed parking lots haven’t got flowers any more so they are guarding cars.
No one is having fun. Not even the people in the restaurants. Not even children at birthday parties. There is an agonising limbo, an all-pervading anxiety.
And we reporters are struggling like hell to tell this story when the action happens so far from town. We also depend on unnamed heroes and heroines who do far more than we to ensure the story gets out.
Every night we know that people are being assaulted, or tortured or beaten. We don’t really expect many fatalities, because Zanu-PF has learned that body counts are bad for business.
We more or less know who is doing the violence as the victims we visit can usually name their assailants.
We know the weapons, logs, poles, metal from dismantled windmills, planks, rope, bicycle chains, nails, everyday objects.
Huts are burned down. I interviewed someone who was in his house and 35 of his neighbours’ houses were also burned. That was a staggering number of people who were made homeless during a couple of hours, before midnight ten days ago in one village about an hour’s drive north-east of Harare.
On Tuesday, I got an sms about what sounded like a massacre. Eleven dead. At first I sighed. Oh God. What to do? Who to call? They won’t all be lying in some field waiting for me to inspect their bodies and pick over their wounds to discover how they died.
They will be scattered. Maybe picked up by cops. Maybe picked up by relatives. Maybe under a tree, a small heap hidden by tall grass.
So far I can only name six and that is thanks to contacts and heroic sources and some hearsay which on examination I now know was true all the time.
There won’t be political funerals. Most will be buried quickly and quietly among the huts in the bush because people are poor and fearful.
I now know that what the MDC’s enormously strained welfare department has been telling us for nearly a week about the 11 dead is almost certainly true.
They have the same problems we have. Difficult communications and they are also working underground and fearful of being arrested. Their information personnel were locked up for three weeks, their computers have been taken, their offices wrecked.
Some of this is being reported, much more will be written in future days and extraordinary everyday heroes will tell generations to come about how they survived the 2008 elections.
They won’t be talking about regime change, or the West, or puppets, they will be talking about teachers at schools, drugs in clinics, buses to “kamusha”, relatives overseas and remembering when they couldn’t buy sugar for a cup of tea.
Even those who voted for Mugabe in the presidential election or who are dependent on their Zanu-PF MP to assist them get grain, are living miserably.
So what should I say about the 11 dead? Say six dead, but reports exist of five more?
There is great relief when sober accounts emerge from concerned doctors who have treated victims and have a broad picture not only of numbers of injured, but through anecdotes, faithfully recorded, of the scale of the violence.
The tension will get worse, so will shopping, finding stuff to keep one going, fuel, the internet, electricity and water cuts and enough batteries to keep everything else going.
Colleagues come in from London, Los Angeles, Brussels, Toronto and Melbourne. Some have been coming in and out for years without fuss and without accreditation. They get the story going again as they report on Zimbabwe with fresh eyes.
Where are the SABC journalists? Where are the South African journalists? What happened since the end of apartheid? Did all the heroes become managing directors? (Thanks e.tv for trying.) Thanks to the few who did come.
Is this generation of South African journalists flaky or leaderless? Or worried about legality when it never bothered them during the apartheid era? Never worried them when foreign journalists sneaked in to South Africa to make documentaries about Steve Biko.
Actually, folks, you don’t need accreditation any longer, as of January 11, it’s not a crime to be a journalist, even if you are foreign.
So why don’t you come up north and tell the story? Please.
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