Tendai Mugabe Senior Reporter
THE 10-point plan laid down by President Mugabe in his State of the Nation Address last week has given political direction to the Government and individual ministries should now convert the points into programmes of action executable within set timeframes, Presidential spokesperson Mr George Charamba has said.
The 10-point plan cuts across all economic enablers. Mr Charamba, who is also the Secretary for Information, Media and Broadcasting Services, said the 10-point plan fell within the four plus one legs of Zim-Asset which are food security and nutrition, social services and poverty eradication, infrastructure and utilities and value-addition and beneficiation.
The fifth leg, which is read together with the Zim-Asset document, is the civil service reorganisation. “Each ministry must locate its point within that broad sense of Zim-Asset,” said Mr Charamba. “It is important to note that the President is not announcing a new policy, but he is clinching Zim-Asset.”
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Mr Charamba said his ministry fell within the third point of the plan which dealt with infrastructural development, particularly in the key energy, water, transport and ICT sub-sectors. He outlined how they were implementing the ICT, especially with respect to broadcasting services.
“We have taken a two-way approach and the first one deals with the last leg of Zim-Asset which is re-organisation of structures,” he said. “Secondly we are dealing with infrastructure development. In respect of re-organisation, all our departments including the ministry itself, are undergoing restructuring. The ministry has had to merge two key departments which are urban communications and media services department.
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“The two departments have now been collapsed into one for effectiveness and in line with the need to cut wage costs. “It also has to do with strengthening the content department organisationally in anticipation of digitisation. “In terms of institutions under it (ministry), you have seen the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation which has lost half of its workforce and we have proposed a new structure which is cost effective, efficient and consistent with the workflow in a digital age.”
Through the ZBC board of directors, Mr Charamba said, they were drafting corporate rules for the national broadcaster in line with guidelines from Cabinet. He said the rules would focus on issues such as salary structures for the top management among other issues.
“We want to make sure that the top is not heavy both numerically and financially. Zimpapers has laid off 107 employees but as a ministry we are still not happy because the savings realised from the retrenchment exercise do not match the number that has gone which means that the cost of the structure lays elsewhere.
“The top structure has to be revisited and as the permanent secretary I am in the process of making recommendations. In this case Government is acting strictly as an investor in Zimpapers via Mass Media Trust. When all this is told, the idea is to make sure that the efficiency arising from the new ICT infrastructure are matched administratively with efficient working institutions.
Mr Charamba said the situation was the same with other entities that fell within his ministry such as New Ziana and Kingstons. He, however, said the grief of retrenched workers from ZBC was short lived as Government would soon rehire them once done with the digitisation process.
“If you break the film industry into its various components you will have script writers which are a whole employment zone, actors and production teams which are also equally huge employment zones,” he said.
“Secondly, you have post-production teams that do the editing and the clothing industry is also set to benefit because each film production has its own dress code. A whole area of transport will also benefit doing the logistics and this is what we are going to trigger. This is why I always say that the grief that visited ZBC employees is short lived. Sooner than later we will call them back because they have experience in broadcasting.”
Mr Charamba said the digitisation programme which was underway was more than mere switching from analogue broadcasting to digital transmission. He said there were several benefits downstream coming along with the new technology. In this regard, Mr Charamba said: “It is founding of a new visual industry in the country. In engineering terms, the infrastructure thrust looks at studios, transmission network, and home front – which is equipping households to use their gadgets on digital platforms.
“This means putting up content centres with three major ones in Harare, Bulawayo and Victoria Falls and one satellite content centre in each geographical province. These are high tech structures which are meant to process film productions. They will have film equipment, editing equipment, theatres and screening facilities and they will also have studios for broadcasting.
“The idea to have a content centre in every province is to make sure that the creative side of all our communities is tickled. The television screen must be the sum totals of our cultures in Zimbabwe hence the need to decentralise content to provinces. “The ultimate goal is to appreciate Bollyhood for India and Nollyhood for Nigeria which are employing millions.”
Mr Charamba said the last component of the digitisation plan focused on skilled manpower and how to tap other benefits that do not fall within the purview of broadcasting such as internet. “Already we have 34 engineers drawn from sub disciplines of electrical, civil, electronic, and ICT engineering who are working together with their Chinese counterparts to ensure that the new broadcasting system works seamlessly, there is strong research and development for broadcasting.
“ZBC used to be a leader in improvising broadcasting equipment and we are restoring that faculty at ZBC. We are also looking at how we pigback other related services on the broadcasting infrastructure because it is expensive to lay the broadcasting backbone. We are paying almost $1 million per year for transponder space for signal distribution.”
Mr Charamba, however, said in most countries they always have a terrestrial backup to the satellite service. “In our case, our entire broadcasting system must rest on fibre optic backbone,” he said.
“It means the Ministry of Information has to work with its sister Ministry of ICTs. We have invested in fibre optic in Zimbabwe and once infrastructure get to the broadcasting transmission site, we look around the institutions which are in the vicinity of that tower to see if they can tap from that fibre optic line for the much needed ICT services like internet and we have 48 such sites.
“The majority of them are in rural areas and it means we are on the cusp of a major ICT breakthrough by way of rural communication.”