By Hopewell Chin’ono
The proposed repeal of the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA) is good news for the media fraternity and the country as a whole, and it will now be a stepping-stone for re-building the trust bled away by months of dishonest engagement and unfulfilled promises.
The removal of this draconian media law was long over due, as it had become the poster child of Zimbabwe’s unwillingness to turn the page from the Robert Mugabe years, and in the process killing the reengagement process.
I would like to congratulate Minister Monica Mutsvangwa and her permanent secretary, Nick Mangwana for getting this through and approved by cabinet.
I have known for months and I have also stated it here that they had the intention to remove this repressive law, but as I have said before, there are saboteurs who have been fighting hard to keep AIPPA and POSA on the books using silly Western narratives to defend that regression.
This has had the effect of not getting any cooperation from the international financial institutions to help kick start the moribund economy.
These institutions have made it clear to government that without reforms, there won’t be any meaningful reengagement between them and government.
The removal of these retrogressive laws from Zimbabwe’s legal books is not beneficial for America or the Western Hemisphere as people like George Charamba would lie to their readers, it is good for Zimbabweans and its success as an economy.
The world moved away from the concept of restricting television and radio services more than two decades ago, Zimbabwe is the only country of its stature in the whole of Southern Africa with only one television station.
This is contrary to the fact that it was the second country in Sub-Saharan Africa in 1960 to have television after Nigeria, today we are a butt of jokes across the continent.
The whole idea of running an unprofessional sole state television station is a backward concept that does not work, and it is daft because with the emergence of the Internet and social media, it is laughable to think that one can restrict how people interact.
Giving ZBC the tools it needs to do its job and the training that will enable its personnel to stop being a national embarrassment is good for Zimbabwe not for the Western world, as the spirited crude propaganda attempts seem to comically assert.
Perhaps the only thing that it will do is to expose the incompetence of those formerly in charge of these institutions when things start to work again after decades of incompetence, unprofessionalism, corruption and lack of regular capacitating programs.
When things start to work, it is the President who will take the credit for that progress, so I don’t know why someone would work day and night to sabotage something that makes their boss look good!
PROPAGANDA does not mean lying about things that will make you a laughing stock, as is the case with ZBC, the Herald and other state media houses.
ZBC can be professional and still serve the national interest and articulate the government line but doing so professionally and broadcasting good programming to its viewers.
The Midlands province where the President comes from is the country’s dairy hub, this is not by accident but for a reason.
The President managed to retain sanity to that province during the chaotic land reform program and he fought hard to make sure that the large-scale farming format was not destroyed in that province.
Instead he got the new black farmers to settle around the big scale farms where they got training and assistance from the big scale farmers.
This concept had been suggested to Robert Mugabe in a letter sent to him in 1980 by the former Tanzanian Foreign Minister, Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu.
If the ZBC genuinely wants to portray the President in good light, this is the kind of stories they should be documenting and broadcasting because they are factual, progressive and they put the President up there without embarrassing the story teller or the subject of the story.
The current farcical reality where saboteurs are resisting the cleaning up of state institutions is because the President has failed to get rid of people who underpinned Mugabe’s dark side, perhaps because he was also part of successive Robert Mugabe administrations.
However if Zimbabwe is going to move forward successfully, he needs to be strong, uncompromising and resolute in removing the saboteurs around him in order to retain confidence both home and abroad.
There are so many Zimbabweans living abroad who were planning to come back home but are shelving those plans because of the rabid rhetoric coming out of his administration, the same kind of rhetoric that underpinned the repression and economic meltdown that made these Zimbabweans leave home in the first place.
Communicating through intimidation, fear, insults and pathetic lies only serves people who want to continue looting the state with their mafia cartels.
Any honest Zimbabwean who has the country at heart would never fight to retain laws that make it difficult for the country to breath again economically, unless they are part of the rotten core that uses the state for self-enrichment.
Government is not run by gimmicks and illusions, doing so will make it difficult for our government to retain any credibility both home and abroad.
Government must take actions that make it easier for the citizen to defend it wherever and whenever within reason.
Currently that social contract has been frozen, the repeal of AIPPA should be the thawing of it and hopefully this is the beginning of a realization by government that it needs to do the right thing for it to succeed.
Our country has reached a point where if it tips over the edge economically, the humanitarian disaster would be too grim to contemplate with hunger being the central problem.
If all doors are closed, the saboteurs will emerge triumphant and the ruthlessness and repression will be openly entrenched because there will be nothing to lose anymore for the ruling elites anymore.
That is why it is important to applaud the baby steps like the removal of AIPPA, it is a slow move in the right direction.
Hopewell Chin’ono is an award winning Zimbabwean international Journalist and Documentary Filmmaker.
He is a Harvard University Nieman Fellow and a CNN African Journalist of the year.
He is also a Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Africa Leadership Institute.
Hopewell has a new documentary film looking at mental illness in Zimbabwe called State of Mind, which was launched to critical acclaim.
The recently departed music superstar Oliver Mtukudzi wrote the sound track for State of Mind.
It was recently nominated for a big award at the Festival International du Film Pan-Africain de Cannes in France. You can watch the documentary trailer below.
