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ONGOING discourses around the controversial Empowerment Act again highlight what’s eating the fabric of our society.
As usual, the media has two diametrically opposed and parallel points of view on the matter.
The private media has voiced its concerns about the arbitrary nature of the impending legislation, of course with good reason. Meanwhile, the supposedly public media has been vocal in supporting the move and lambasting those who think otherwise.
The past decade is littered with painful memories of so-called Zanu PF empowerment programmes that have ultimately achieved the direct opposite. It is disheartening to note that the so called public media has been so consistent in misinforming the public with disastrous consequences to the majority of Zimbabweans.
Are the Zimbabwe government in general and Zanu PF in particular such embodiments of perfection that the public media find nothing worth their critique? In a progressive society, media criticism has helped to improve the general performance of politicians in serving their masters, the public, through vocal constructive criticism.
The empowerment legislation should have been a wake-up call for the supposedly public media to play its role in informing the public especially taking a cue from the disasters of yesteryear.
No one is against empowerment per se but it has to be done in a manner that is beneficial to every Zimbabwean regardless of race, colour or creed.
There are white people in Africa and Zimbabwe who were born and bred here and were also told verbatim, like us black Zimbabweans, that they came from Europe but they have never set foot there. Are these people not indigenous Zimbabweans?
Nations and continents were born out of migration and thus no one can claim, no matter how high and mighty, that so and so is not an indigenous Zimbabwean but so and so is. Saviour Kasukuwere’s empowerment programme is replete with narrow-mindedness, selfishness and the ever-looming danger of self-aggrandisement.
That is the major bone of contention surrounding this controversial empowerment act.
If black Zimbabweans can afford to purchase 51% worth of shares from existing companies, then real empowerment entails creating an enabling environment for them to resuscitate idle industries and/or create new ones. Grabbing someone’s hard earned assets as we did with the farms does not sound like empowerment to me. It is plain theft and patronage, period.
I can bet that most of those unfortunate companies that will be grabbed, yes, it’s grabbing, will be dominated by Zanu PF officials and their bootlickers.
They did it with the farms, why wouldn’t they do it now? The result: most will lose their jobs as they will be replaced by “patriots” some of whom lack minimum intellectual merit, some will collapse, indeed they will. How much acquired farmland is lying idle today or worse still, how much is being leased to the same people who were dispossessed of it in the first place?
If civil servants and most other professionals are earning peanuts then it is not speculation that they will not be able to purchase any of those shares.
Kasukuwere and his cohorts not unmixed with the equally greedy AAG will again reap where they did not sow. They are the only ones with the money and the political muscle to purchase the shares not us.
Is that empowerment? Will the public media say anything about it? Indigenisation and empowerment ought to be objective, realistic and holistic if ever Zimbabwe is going to move forward.
I think it’s high time the public media started to be the voice of the voiceless and stop being used by greedy politicians who have caused us untold suffering while our voices are drowned for the sake of patronage.
Joachim Garikai is based at the Midlands State University Gweru.
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