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Weekly Media Update 2010-30
The Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe
Monday August 2nd - Sunday August 8th 2010
August 13, 2010

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The week's top stories

Harare City Council's defiance of a government directive to reduce salaries for council senior management added spice to an otherwise quiet week in which the government-controlled media flooded their audiences with news on Heroes' and Defence Forces' Day commemorations.

While the government media were engrossed in these festivities, they paid scant attention to warnings of imminent hunger in Zimbabwe and human rights violations, the majority of which were related to the Constitutional Parliamentary Committee (Copac)'s consultative programme.

Govt, Harare City Fathers cross swords over salaries

Clashes between government and the Harare City Council over alleged hefty salaries being paid to council executives, reported to be around $20 000 per month, dominated the media's coverage of local government issues.

These comprised 17 (47%) of the media's 36 stories on the local government's operations.

Four were on a row between Harare Council Mayor Muchadeyi Masunda and Mashonaland Central Governor Martin Dinha over the governor's alleged resistance to the council's acquisition of 26 farms from his province for expansion purposes. The remaining 15 highlighted symptoms of poor service delivery by local government authorities around the country. These included shortages of safe drinking water, poor street lighting and bad state of roads, sporadic refuse collection and outbreak of water-borne diseases such as Typhoid.

Both the government and private media publicised the Harare Council's refusal to comply with the government directive on salary cuts as part of efforts to improve service delivery. They widely quoted Local Government Deputy Minister Sesel Zvidzai (head of a committee appointed by government to enforce the directive) ordering local authorities to comply with central government's policy stipulating that 70 percent of council revenue should go towards service delivery provision and the remainder to salaries (NewsDay & The Zimbabwean On Sunday, 22 & 25/7).

However, The Herald (3/8) quoted Masunda insisting that council would not slash the salaries as doing so was not only "illegal" but would also result in council losing its skilled workers. It quoted the mayor: "The issue has been blown out of proportion. We will not trample on employee rights. We will not tamper with their packages."

The paper also reported Masunda criticising Zvidzai, saying he was "least qualified" to enforce the government directive without elaboration. Neither was he asked to explain the purported illegality of the directive. It was only at the end of the week that a NewsDay (6/8) story: Govt wins salary war, reported the Harare Council as having finally bowed down to government pressure to reduce the salaries following a meeting between Masunda and Zvidzai. However, it remained unclear how this was going to be achieved, especially in light of Masunda's vague insistence that council would "continue paying its workers salaries guided by norms in the region".

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