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Weekly Media Update 2010-17
The Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe (MMPZ)
Monday May 3rd 2010 - Sunday May 9th 2010
May 17, 2010

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Media reform remains tangled in bureaucracy

As Zimbabweans commemorated World Press Freedom Day on May 3rd news that the new Zimbabwe Media Commission would be accepting applications for the registration of new players in the print media sector from the following day, was little cause for celebration.

First of all, the Commission has made no effort to publicize this news itself or explain the requirements necessary for the successful submission of new applications.

The ZMC, ostensibly an independent body, had an opportunity to announce these requirements at its own World Press Freedom Day function and to allay the doubts among the assembled media community about its commitment to oversee genuine media reforms.

But the event itself, dominated by senior government officials in the ministry of information, had precisely the opposite effect. Although Information Minister Webster Shamu did talk vaguely about "everything being in place" to comply with the Global Political Agreement's requirement for real media reforms, the mechanics of achieving these were never made clear.

In fact, the event confirmed suspicions that the ZMC's notorious predecessor, the Media and Information Commission, including its chairman, Tafataona Mahoso, had been retained to serve as the ZMC's secretariat.

The MIC, under Mahoso's management, was responsible for suffocating all independent media development and presided over the banning of the country's most popular daily newspaper, The Daily News, among other publications.

Now, as the ZMC's chief executive officer, he will again be responsible for ensuring that applications for new media organizations comply with the regulations before being passed on to the commissioners for "processing". Although ZMC commissioner Chris Mhike was reported in a NewsDay supplement to the Independent (7/5) defending Mahoso's appointment on the grounds that he was a "mere personality" who no longer had any of the authority he wielded as chairman of the MIC, it has subsequently become clear that he will be applying the very same excessively bureaucratic and intrusive application regulations established under the notorious Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act that he used so effectively to suffocate independent media initiatives under MIC.
These restrictive application regulations include the demand for new media groups to submit a prospective cash flow statement of the business, a balance sheet projection, a market analysis, a mission statement, a code of conduct for employees, an editorial charter, a code of ethics, a stylebook, and a dummy of the product. Similarly bureaucratic and intrusive conditions apply for individual journalists seeking a licence to operate.

Such intrusive and bureaucratic conditions will clearly have the effect of delaying and frustrating the activities of journalists and the entrance of new, privately owned players in the print media industry.

They are entirely unnecessary and constitute a violation of Zimbabweans' constitutional rights to free expression and the African Union's Declaration of Principles on Freedom of Expression adopted in 2002.

If the ZMC wishes to escape being viewed as just another layer of bureaucracy added to an already excessively bureaucratic system, it must campaign, as a first step, for these absurd regulations to be abolished forthwith, and to recommend that it hand over the responsibility of registering journalists and media houses to the independent Voluntary Media Council of Zimbabwe, established by the country's own journalists and media institutions to regulate their media environment.

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