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Farirai Machivenyika, Harare Bureau

The Zimbabwe Newspapers Group (1980)’s publications and radio stations are driven by defending the national interests and enhancing shareholder value.

This was said by the company’s chief executive officer, Mr Pikirayi Deketeke, while briefing the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Information, Media and Broadcasting Services during a tour to familiarise themselves with the company’s operations. “Our editorial policy is to look after national interest first,” said Mr Deketeke.

“What is it that Zimbabweans want to hear and want to talk about, what concerns them, those are the things that we tell our editors to say when you are going in, look after the national interest, look after the things that we think we can protect but also tell their story and also let them tell their story.”

Mr Deketeke added the company has a charter that promotes editorial independence without undue influence from outside.

“We have here an editorial charter of independence to say our editors run their newspapers. If tomorrow they have a story that says the CEO did this, they are able to write and tell you ‘go hang’ because they have that independence.

“If you are not agreeing with them in terms of the business, then you can dismiss them the next day but as long as they are in control and in authority, the direction that the newspaper takes is determined to large extent by them.

“The team who run those publications interpret their jobs variously. So we don’t sit and say we have an editorial committee of the board that then calls in these guys to say are you in line, are you serving the interests of Zimbabweans as mandated in the beginning, it is not there,” he said. 

Mr Deketeke also said he could not answer on behalf of investors after the Committee’s chairperson, Mr Prince Dubeko Sibanda questioned him about the Mass Media Trust and its mandate.

The MMT is the majority shareholder in Zimpapers. “We cannot answer on behalf of the Mass Media Trust as an investor. The MMT should answer for itself as an investor.

“In our view, the Parliament should ask and take to task the MMT itself that ‘who are you’? Are you following the statutes you were formed to observe and so on. Here they are just an investor like any other Zimbabwean who is entitled to invest in Zimpapers. 

“When Government gave money to the MMT, they could have set up its own 100 percent owned company with a clear mandate to say ‘your mandate is to inform, educate and to do this and that’. Here they bought into a private registered company whose mandate was to make profit in the media space and bought 51 percent. So we get asked that question, how about MMT? We are not MMT unfortunately, but they own us and neither can we disown them. But who they are, where they are, all we have is Trust deed and we carry on.”