George Charamba lashes out at media graduates

SOME of the university and college graduates of journalism can hardly string a grammatically correct English sentence, says the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Information, Media and Broadcasting Services, Mr George Charamba.

He said this during deliberations with ZiFM staffers at the privately owned radio station's strategic workshop in Nyanga last week.

"We have graduates in the media industry who can hardly string a decent English sentence. The English is very bad, the Shona and Ndebele is worse.

It is quite unfortunate that in recent years journalism has been all about shouting at politician X or Y, and that is not the situation anymore.

"In this country, having a master's degree is not a novelty and if one has three or four, then we start talking. There you are, a journalism graduate armed with an 'O' Level certificate trying to interview me with my five degrees. God forbid! If you chose to join a knowledge industry, you have no excuse to be ignorant. Go to school. Schools are there," he said.

In an interview on the sidelines of the same event, Mr Charamba also spoke about developments in the licensing of community radio stations.

"It is a complex situation in which we now have many players willing to come on board in the industry. The Broadcasting Authority of Zimbabwe is in the process of licensing new stations, however, there are a number of issues that come into play.

"There are issues to do with morality, culture, politics, and technical quality and so on, vis-a-vis the monitoring of the stations. That means BAZ needs to be equipped financially to carry out the task. It is easy to monitor a station in Harare or Bulawayo, but the same cannot be said of the anticipated scenario where we might end up having stations in areas such as Masvingo, for example," he said.

Mr Charamba also spoke about ownership of the stations.

"It is also imperative to note that the ownership of the community radio stations remains an issue lying in obscurity. One wonders whether these are communities coming up with their own radio stations initiatives, or elites with own agendas using the names of communities. As far as we are concerned, community radio stations must be for the communities, by the communities and of the communities," he said.

The Permanent Secretary also told participants at the ZiFM workshop that Government would scrap the contentious listeners' licence fee being charged everyone with a receiver.

The Broadcasting Services Act, which penalises the possession of a radio or television signal receiver without a valid licence, has over the years come under severe criticism as some argued that the possession or ownership of a television signal receiver does not necessarily mean it was intended for purposes of accessing ZBC's broadcast material.

ZBC, in its capacity as the nation's public broadcaster, has been the sole beneficiary of the listeners' licence fee.

However, Mr Charamba said the fee was not serving its intended purpose, hence the decision to scrap it.