Richard Garwe 🇿🇼

WHEN I USED TO SAY THIS, the retort was that Charamba wants to corrupt and control journalism. The one thing you are taught in Journalism 101 is that it is a public service, indeed a public good! In many jurisdictions, the media get public funding in many ways: direct funding by the State - not Government! - or indirect funding through numerous tax concessions especially around inputs into their production processes. More sophisticated jurisdictions give “bottom-up”support, which is to say greater support is extended to smaller, struggling fringe publications to ensure plurality of voices. Nordic countries are examples. Here State support faces aspersions from the same media and readers who think funding from foreign governments channeled through pseudo-NGOs or institutions like USAID - when it lasted - is the shibboleth of free press/media in the sense of an institution insulated from the State. You would think they don’t know which State(s) is/are behind their (N)GO benefactors! It is an ignorant view of the political economy of the communication industry. Completely illiterate and duplicitous. When we created IMPI during the ministerial tenure of Professor Jonathan Moyo, it was as if we committed an abomination by getting journalists on it, in return for very modest stipends. The result was the seminal report - the only one in the history of this country - which gauged expectations of all stakeholders on media products. It is there, gathering dust! Closer home, there was this binary between so-called PRIVATE MEDIA and GOVERNMENT MEDIA, the nomenclature deliberately deployed to imply both quality and probity. That false dichotomy created a riven and polarised media environment. Meanwhile not once did any of the so-called private media turn down advertorials from the State, which amount to 60% of media proceeds in any jurisdiction worldwide. Note once, too, did we see any private media give away media products to the public for free, while restricting income to private sector business. You don’t need to be supremely educated to know that media product sales with the public necessarily make that business public, the same way taxes are!!! Even more recent, the Office of the President and Cabinet donated two cars to two newsmen - broadcasters - who have been working on the liberation struggle beat. There was a false uproar, again centred around giving a bad name to State support. Now I see that in the wake of dearth and death of Foreign Governmental Organisation (FOGO) masquerading as NGO, our media people - journalists, trade unionists, managers and proprietors - have now woken to what in the West is a truism: that journalism is a public good which can and should be publicly funded! Welcome to the real world, Comrades!!!