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Professor Moyo

Farirai Machivenyika Senior Reporter
Information, Media and Broadcasting Services Minister Professor Jonathan Moyo has called on the media to report more on issues that promote nation building instead of preoccupying themselves with events and personalities that tend to polarise societies. Prof Moyo said this while addressing media practitioners from countries drawn from East and Southern Africa attending a two-day workshop on the role of the media in nation building organised by Silveira House.

“The media has a very important role to play in nation building and economic development of a country but sadly the media in our respective countries has not played that role to a satisfactory degree. By and large, much more needs to be done by our media to be able to play its role and contribute to nation building and economic development in our countries,” he said.

Prof Moyo said it was unfortunate that the media in most African countries had failed to contextualise the manner in which they report on issues affecting the continent unlike what their counterparts in the US and Western countries do.

“The reason why the media has not played its role in nation building and economic development in our respective countries is primarily because the media has remained caught up in some notion of preoccupation with events and personalities.

“The media have been about the story of the day, more about what has happened and who is in that story than about the significance of the story in some historical context and in the long term the implication of the story on nation building and economic development and this has contributed quite a lot to some of the political problems we have had,” Prof Moyo said.

“In fact, if you look at the media in other countries elsewhere you will notice that unlike the media in our respective countries, the media there is about presenting events and personalities against the backdrop of a clearly discernible perspective and what is always important is the perspective and not the event.

All the reports on events and personalities are clearly contextualised and it is often a powerful perspective about the history of the countries and powerful perspective about their self-understanding and identities of these countries what they stand for within their borders and what they stand for and project outside their borders as foreign policy,” he said. He said while the media in most developed countries tell their stories from their perspective, be it at national, regional or international level, Africa had failed to develop its media to speak from an African point of view.

He said it was regrettable that frequently, African media had reported on their domestic issues in a manner that hurt their respective countries’ interests.

Prof Moyo added that in seeking to promote nation building and economic development, the media had to promote national unity, creation of wealth by the respective countries, social justice and fair distribution of resources, democracy, peace and stability and emphasise their countries’ sovereignty and independence.

He also said the media had a role to play in defining nationhood among African states by emphasising the ideals of the struggles for independence as the source for creating shared values among citizens.

“The sources should be found in the history of these countries, the sources should be in the values and ideals in the struggles for independence for these countries. Surely, those struggles for independence in terms of the history are very recent and we must have had some common values and issues that led to the independence struggles and those issues should define our nationhood,” Prof Moyo said.

The two-day workshop is being attended by journalists from Zimbabwe, Kenya, Botswana, Zambia and Kenya.