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Wisdom Mumera
Last week, the Southern African Research and Documentation Centre hosted a workshop on the post-elections media environment in Zimbabwe. Key speakers included Zimbabwe Electoral Commission deputy chairperson Joyce Leticia Kazembe who light-heartedly insisted on the Leticia part because she is on the sanctions list and there is another Joyce Kazembe who is not.

The other was Secretary for Information, Media and Broadcasting Services Mr George Charamba.
According to the ground rules of the workshop, the speakers were supposed to be match-heads which would simply torch the flames, igniting the bonfire of debate and discussions on the issues tabled and not preachers to a bemused congregation.

However, by the time both speakers had finished delivering, the gathered group of journalists had been rightly reduced to a guilty bedraggled assembly fumbling for relevance as an important Estate of the State.

The discussion which was supposed to be the core of the workshop never materialised as, cross-beamed by the analysis of the industry and the mathematical summation from Kazembe and Charamba, the journalists sat bereft of ideas for rejoinders or complaints.

Apparently the stench of their own electoral excrement was too strong for them to ignore as a flailing question from Zimbabwe Union of Journalists president Michael Chideme was all that the dumbstruck floor managed.

The moderator tried all he could with his bearded smiles to woo the frozen pack to ask questions or say anything but no one was forthcoming.

The cause of this strange impotence in discussion from personnel whose work is to interview and interrogate was a reflection of their multiple failures and gross negligence of their core duties in the period leading up to the harmonised elections.

Charamba later summed it up as a general paralysis that is going on even up to now.
During the electoral period the media leapt into political battles with more vigour and emotion than the politicians themselves, borrowing battles from parties that they sided with, becoming partisan and thereby castrating their own virility as the Fourth Estate.

By becoming partisan the media lost their detachment from events, an aura which should shield them from being subjective and remain critically objective in their duties.

This left society largely without a dependable voice to downgrade political rhetoric from the high clanging gongs it usually is to the bare essentials which have meaning to the people.

Kazembe went further to state that because of the failure to report simple things, many people were turned away from polling stations because they lacked correct documentation.

The media had found it tedious to simply relate the requirements for one to qualify to vote, instead choosing to unleash large railings of their own on the beauty of certain parties against others.

To sum up the paralysis the media was suffering from Charamba noted that after the elections, the media had suddenly found itself standing with a cocked gun whose target had already fallen leaving it fumbling for editorial direction which most were failing to find.

The elections had been late in coming and when they finally did come, they had ended too soon for the media.
The truth of these sentiments should leave the media soul searching on how they can, not only repent but transform themselves back to their core mandate of being an independent player that stands apart from the emotionalism and transience of politics, standing in the belief of its own longevity as a societal feature capable of making progressive change.

This is possible without even hitching onto the trailers of political parties.
In as much as independence is nothing but a relative state of distance from one thing to another, the media should maximise that relative distance from trivialising their existence to the level of fighting the turf wars of politics, forgetting that they stand for a much higher cause.

That cause is being the voice and interpreter for the public.
The very act itself of immersing itself into the wars of politics to a degree where one can’t separate a party leaflet from a newspaper article becomes a slide down into actions of a base nature from a region of higher calling.

Some publications became so intoxicated with the broth of their infatuation for certain parties to the extent that they failed to read clear signs falling headlong into false predictions. — New Ziana