daniel chigunwe
Enacy Mapakame recently in Accra – Ghana
The media have been challenged to take a leading role in unearthing mal-practice in public offices, enhance debt accountability and public finance management to enable the African region, Zimbabwe included, achieve meaningful development from its vast natural resources.
The region is endowed with some of the world’s largest mineral deposits but also has some of the poorest countries in the world.
Corruption, illicit financial flows, debt injustice and mismanagement of resources are among the key challenges affecting the region and keeping it poor.
The lack of transparency and accountability has also led to deterioration of public service delivery with urban centres, for instance Harare residents going for years without running water on their taps, while sewer reticulation is poor, also resulting in the spread of diseases such as cholera and typhoid.
Another challenge the region faces is unsustainable borrowing, leading to a debt distress status, which countries like Malawi, Mozambique, Sao Tome and Principe, Somalia, Sudan, Zambia and Zimbabwe are currently entangled in.
Africa Centre for Energy Policy (ACEP) executive director, Benjamin Boakye, said it was imperative for the media to play a checks and balances role to ensure accountability in the face of the region losing out to illicit financial flows.
“Corruption and bad governance are cancerous issues keeping Africa poor. The media therefore need to play a critical role in bringing public officers to account.
“We have vast resources as a region but nothing to show for it because there are a few who benefit from them through illicit trades. At the end countries start procuring debt, which again benefits a few. As the media, it is your role to unearth these shenanigans, explain where the resources are going, so that everyone benefit from meaningful development,” he said during the third edition of the AFRODAD Media Initiative (Afromed 111) held in Accra – Ghana last week.
Fourth Estate editor-in-chief Manasseh Azure Awumi also concurred on the critical role of the media in bringing transparency and accountability in utilisation of resources, as well as debt contraction and utilisation.
“The problem we are also seeing today is some media houses playing public relations roles for politicians and certain organisations. This should not be the case but we should police and scrutinise public finance management,” he said.
AFRODAD policy, advocacy and research manager Theophilus Yungong Jong highlighted the need for the media to be on the look-out during election periods to bring politicians to account.
Bongani Ndlovu