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Isdore Guvamombe Reflections
Back in the village, in the land of milk, honey and dust or Guruve, hoes digging the same hole cannot avoid knocking against each other, no matter how careful. There, the village soothsayer, the ageless autochthon of wisdom and knowledge, at times goes vulgar in order to make a point.
“Buttocks”, he says, “are like a married couple though there is constant friction between them, they will still love and live together.”
They are tolerant.
The full import of this is that as journalists working in Zimbabwe and affiliated to the Zimbabwe Union of Journalists, friction is unavoidable yet we should remain members of the noble profession.
ZUJ is, and shall for a long time, theoretically remain the vanguard of journalism in Zimbabwe, as per the mandate we gave it, and, a mandate which we support financially, through our monthly subscriptions.
This villager, a self-developed word-smith, does not contest the National Journalistic and Merit Awards precisely because they do not conform to minimum standards of village fairness and credibility.
For example, this village word-smith contesting with a student on attachment for feature writing, when the villager literally rewrites the student’s feature as his editor?
That is utter lunacy.
What can a mosquito do to an elephant with that thick skin, village elders would ask?
For starters ZUJ, which has by and large manifested itself as a union of condolences and solidarity messages, has on the other hand successfully held these awards annually.
While that is laudable, there is serious need for authenticity, transparency and accountability and any member of the union deserves the right to question the goings-on, without being attacked by the leadership.
The preponderance to attack the person and not address issues raised has become the mainstay of the current ZUJ leadership, including Foster Dongozi.
It is their legacy and we shall forever remember them for this. Poor Garikai Mazara, Dumisani Muleya and this villager are living testimonies.
The NJAMA awards should be awards of excellence and should therefore not be treated as humanitarian awards. They should be on merit.
This is a profession.
The fact that ZUJ has left the awards open to contest by all and sundry from one-day-wonder journalists, to junior reporters and editors, makes the awards a melting pot of bones, flesh, soup, soil and sand.
That is ZUJ’s mistake number one. It is a self-prepared cocktail or buffet of problems!
Editors compete with their reporters and this is why there is a rumour that ZUJ leadership ends up using inside knowledge and personal grudges to de-list and short-list finalists instead of using the presented work.
Whether the leadership really does that or not, the fact remains that the leadership is culpable because of lack of a clear-cut policy on what editors and reporters compete for and also because of lack of transparency.
The judges are forever unknown and there is a rumour that has upset many that one former veteran journalist, who used to work for a musician once exposed by a writer, is a panellist in entertainment.
The judge is said to have actually de-listed one of the country’s most celebrated writers on the basis of a long-standing personal grudge.
The union should be accountable and tolerant to its members’ divergent views, but there is a growing tendency to head-butt and crush any dissenting voice.
ZUJ is not a military barrack, but a union of journalists. The union leadership must listen to its membership and correct mistakes quietly, in most of the cases.
Where a response is called for, including the right to reply, it must be factual and corrective and not hogwash.
With a more serious, credible and innovative leadership, ZUJ should by now be able to be monitoring stories as they are published in the media everyday and reward those journalists that are consistently outstanding in their particular beats.
For a union that largely does nothing other than gallivanting, passing condolences and solidarity messages, there should certainly be enough time to monitor newspaper, TV and radio content, libel, defamation and even ordinary misconduct, including corruption.
ZUJ should by now have a database of who is who in journalism and who writes what and with what effect. But it does not.
Fetid!
Awards must not be given on submission of stories but on the basis of year-long monitored stories.
For someone who was once vice president of ZUJ under the leadership of Mathew Takaona, at times this villager feels that the baton stick was handed to someone who left the race track and ran into the mountains.
How does it happen that ZUJ still cannot do one man, one vote in the year of our lord 2013? Surely this is the time for one man one vote.
Liberation movements Zanu-PF and PF Zapu fought for this in the 1960s and it was implemented in 1980. But 33 years into independence ZUJ, with a membership around 1 000, cannot implement this?
My cracked feet!
If ZUJ cannot conduct a simple one man one vote, expecting it to hold free, fair and credible national journalistic awards is akin to expecting honey from a fly.
The current ZUJ leadership is culpable of another serious journalistic malpractice where it complied with regime-change tactics of dividing journalists along the so–called private and public media.
Journalists in the private media benefited from many training programmes in Europe in the past four or so years and ZUJ complied with the request that such journalists must come from the private media.
A union worth its salt would refuse and say, journalists are journalists because they can work at any media house.
But because the ZUJ leadership joined the gravy train and went on the Vasco Da Gama type, errands alongside selected journalists, they could not say no.
But because the ZUJ leadership got funding from the regime-change agents, they could not say no.
That in itself is journalistic treason. We are the same journalists. We all need additional training. The leadership did it for money.
Back in the village, elders would say if money was to be found up in the trees, the ZUJ leadership would be married to monkeys.
ZUJ leadership has also failed to flush out bogus journalists, famed for gate-crushing into functions where they misbehave and tarnish the image of the profession.
What profession is now left to superintend?
This villager, who once aspired to take over the leadership at an elective congress, has since decided to shelve the plans until the organisation is able to hold free, fair and credible elections, using one man one vote system.
The current scenario where, for example, Zimpapers Harare Branch has more than 80 ZUJ-registered journalists but is entitled to two votes at congress and the same voting right is extended to The Zimbabwean with three registered journalists is not only a mockery but an insult to the intelligence of all journalists and well-meaning Zimbabweans.
Finally, village elders say a man who swallows a mango seed must surely know that he has a big opening. By writing this article this villager has swallowed a mango seed.
The ZUJ leadership should stop attacking journalists airing their views because freedom of speech is one of the tenets of the democracy we so cry for and flaunt around.
The ZUJ leadership should know that the more a monkey climbs up a tree, the more it exposes its essentials.
This villager humbly awaits his turn to be abused by the ZUJ leadership.
Online Reporter