Keep your Muck, we keep our newspapers!
MUCKRACKER SCAN

Muckraker’s column in The Independent

Tichaona Zindoga My Turn
So it finally came; the big one.
Last Friday week, a whole page was dedicated to this humble writer on a column called Muckracker from one of the newspapers based in downtown Harare.(This is confirming what I have stated in these lines that you know that you have addressed a real issue, touched a raw nerve, when there is a flurry of responses. You do not get the same when you are blithe and ambivalent. I like to take strong stances.)

The issue was on that tacky Bryan Adams/Warriors submission by this column and Muckracker felt duty- bound to add his own two cents, and critically, take the opportunity to dress down this poor writer. For those that may have missed it, this is about the nut and kernel of what Muckracker said:
He took issue with The Herald’s “vituperative columnists” especially “one called Tichaona Zindoga who wears dark glasses” whom he accused of “being busy promoting a hostile agenda in the State Press”.
Zindoga is “obviously dull but malicious”.
Zindoga has an inexcusable “bigotry” problem.
Zindoga is “an official voice of the regime” (oh, really?).
“Has Zindoga ever been to Borrowdale, we wonder?” he pondered.

For sounding out the concerns about the show and its connotations, which were even held by other newspapers that this writer duly quoted as editorialising on the issue, Zindoga had a case to answer at the Human Rights Commission, according to Muck- racker.
It could well have been The Hague!

We do not usually take pains to respond to issues and gripes issuing from the aforementioned part of town, but there is something rather curious in this columnist, who has this particular belief that he is the best editor in town and especially dedicates his time to playing the critic-in-chief of The Herald and Sunday Mail newspapers.

This is not the first time that this writer has been subject of Muckracker’s attacks, which have also been directed at other columnists, reporters and editors who are guilty of marshalling  newspapers under the Zimpapers stable.
He censures and excoriates.
He calls us names.
The irony, of course, is that while he spends his time playing critic-in-chief and super editor of papers that are always deemed the best in the country in terms of content and market presence, his own fares rather badly!

One recent statistic said The Independent, which Muckracker features in, is read by a measly 1 percent of the country’s readership.
It is the least read paper in the country.

Of course, his self-deceiving stable is always at pains to deny credible polls that place its titles at the bottom of the heap, where they belong, and in playing the ostrich, they commission their own surveys, for obvious reasons.

And we do not have the pleasure of seeing this Muckracker guy, who must be the cowardly fellow whose eyes we presume to see in the dustbins that illustrate his column.

Many people would heartily laugh at the implicit message of this humble writer being profiled as wearing dark glasses because of the image’s suggestion of, and association with, some bad guys that happen to sport similar glasses.

If the Muckrackers of this world did not shy away from where plebeians like us frequent, he would not try to play up this inconsequential detail, of which even his colleagues down there would know.

But does this know-it-all care, anyway?
He is not one of us, that is why he asks whether Zindoga has ever been to Borrowdale.
Budiriro, Sakubva, Chitungwiza, etc, do not exist in his imagination or lexicon.

Which, by the way, was the quintessential message in my piece whose nub is best captured by that song by Simon Chimbetu, in which he tells us of a certain group of people that does not stay in the aforementioned suburbs – the “homesteads of the people”.
Nor do they come where we commemorate our heroes or at nationally significant events and games.

Chimbetu says: “You said they would change/Oh it has failed…/working together with them has failed…bring back the spirit of the revolution.”
It is a 2000 song entitled “Ndima”.
Muckracker’s ego is palpable.
Say racialist superego, to be precise, as this columnist, probably because of the colour of his skin, does not seem to believe in the capacities of those on the other side of the bar.

That is why he takes it upon himself to lecture the black editors of this stable on how to write, edit and run their papers.
The world would be such a miserable place with such people in control and at large.
Luckily, they rightly belong to the past.
Like the glory and bullying of Giraffe of an old tale.
It is said that Giraffe, once upon a time, was such a cruel and powerful fella in the animal kingdom.
He used his height and famed kicks to devastating effect.
He had a loud booming voice, too.
He was feared.
So, early in the morning he would shout across the forest for the animals to wake up and come to him so he would do whatever he liked with them, just as bullies always do.
No one could resist it.
If the animals dared not come, they would be severely punished.
Given his vantage height, he could also see who had hidden where.
He was such a terrorist, and the animals finally complained to the Creator.
The Creator heard their cries.
Giraffe was punished: he would no longer have the voice to wake the animals up and to commandeer and bully them.
It was a sad denouement for him.

Happy for the animal kingdom with such a bully without the voice and the command and ego.
Luckily, the Muckracking Giraffes of our profession no longer have the voice.
It must have been hard for the pioneering black journalists with such Giraffes out and about.
The beauty about today is that being a free and democratic country that will never be a colony again, we are able to write what we want, which also happens to serve the interests of the majority.
The editors here have earned their stripes.

They will not be bothered by the squealing of some voyeurs who are obsessed with commenting on issues in other people’s houses.

They can keep their Muck and we shall keep our newspapers!

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