PUBLISHERS: THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY

By Bill Saidi   IN 1993, on a visit to the city of Tucson, Arizona, in the United States, we foreign editors met an editor and a publisher who had agreed to disagree. They would part company, amicably, because one of them would not support the other’s favoured presidential candidate. The editor would leave his job, he told us, happy that he had not compromised his principles. The publisher had told him to support a particular presidential candidate. His reply was an unequivocal NO WAY! How heroic, how courageous, I thought. I was reminded of my two mentors and heroes – Richard Hall and Kelvin Mlenga. It’s a brave editor, anywhere in the developing world, who would defy the publisher or the owner of the company, so openly – and not get the boot. In my experience I have been told to go and start my own paper, if I didn’t want to take orders from above. To a proposal, made by some of his colleagues in the Zambian Cabinet, that I take over as editor-in-chief of Times Newspapers, an influential cabinet minister responded with the categorical declaration: “Saidi doesn’t like to take orders.”ow he In the United Kingdom, there will always be the example of Harold Evans. He quit as editor of The Sunday Times, rather than serve under Rupert Murdoch, the new owner of the publishing company. The Australian-born media mogul has garnered a reputation for dictatorial tendencies towards his editors. Most of the real professionals quit. Murdoch’s emperor-style rule has led to editors speaking of him in highly inflammatory, if not derogatory language. Some must see him as the ugliest example of a publisher. There are many such examples in Africa too, In Zimbabwe; there is the government, the owner of the largest media conglomerate in the country.  It must represent, collectively, the ugliest face of publishers in the country. Editors have been fired right, left and centre. The reasons are usually the same – not toeing the line. There are many such publishers all over Africa, in which most governments are de facto publishers. Only in South Africa, has the government deliberately kept away from running any newspapers. They have enough clout in the SABC, they must believe. But this is counterweighed by TV and radio stations owned entirely by the private sector. So far, not even the lunatic fringe of the African National Congress and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) - which must include the likes of Julius Malema - has convinced the government it ought to muscle in on the independent newspaper owners. Ghana, which pioneered the African one-party, one-leader, one-newspaper system, has long shed the image of this monolithic, monstrous behemoth running everything in one country. But many leaders still find it extremely attractive, paying only lip service to real democracy. Zimbabwe, apart from the government, in its role as publisher being one hell of an ugly example, has a number of publishers who must quality for the sobriquet “ugly as sin”. There are privately-owned companies whose publishers might – pound for pound – be even uglier specimens than the government. At The Standard newspaper in Harare, journalists have preserved on their notice board a declaration by publisher Trevor Ncube: it says those among them not satisfied with the pay could leave. When I joined the paper in 2006, at the invitation of the then editor, Davison Maruziva, I asked the staff why they hadn’t quit. They said, almost in unison, there was nowhere else to go – which Ncube probably knew. So, they have been stuck with him ever since. Thirty of us editors from overseas were visiting the US during a presidential year. This was a presidential election year, which coincided with the ongoing demise of Communism in Europe. The Berlin Wall had collapsed. On the surface, democracy had triumphed in all of Europe. Of course, we now know that the picture was far more complex than just the replacement of the hammer and sickle by another one, signifying complete pluralism. The US government had invited editors, including myself, to visit the country for a month. Not only were we to view, up close and personal, US democracy at work during the presidential elections. We were also to visit as many big and small newspapers as they could squeeze us into, right across the vastness of this country. There were editors from Africa, Europe, Asia, Australasia and Latin America. I was the only one from Zimbabwe. By then, I was working for Modus Publications. It was in the glorious capacity of editorial director of The Sunday Times. Previously owned by Herbert Munangatire, it had been bought by Elias Rusike’s Modus Publications. At that time, Rusike was riding high. But it wouldn’t be long before he realised he had taken on more than he could chew. Munangatire’s editor was a former editor of The Manica Post, Tim Chigodo. I was appointed editorial director by Rusike, the former chief executive of Zimpapers, owners of that weekly. Chigodo and I had worked together at The Times of  Zambia in the 1970s. He was my subordinate then and was still so back home. There was little doubt that he did not enjoy working under me. I was effectively in charge of the whole shebang. Then there was Munangatire himself. We had known each other since 1957 when I joined The African Daily News as a cadet reporter. He was something senior at The African Weekly.. He was a good reporter, by all accounts and, from my own point of view, a good journalist, I always admired his grasp of the English idiom. But once I decided to instill my own imprint on the editorial content of the paper, there was upheaval. Munangatire was heard to complain:”What is Saidi doing to my newspaper?” Fortunately, he never said this to my face, or we probably would have had a right royal row. At African Newspapers, Munangatire had a nickname – Mhupu. The Shona translation is someone of a flamboyant nature, which he was. I have always set great store for the authority and autonomy of the editor. Some critics have told me this is old-fashioned. A sort of “team” must have a decisive influence on the paper, they say. There ought to be consensus. I have always subscribed to that dictum too. But I have always drawn the line where “the soul” of the paper is concerned. The editor has values and tenets to which he must strongly subscribe, some times religiously. All these must be reflected in the paper – or else the readers might find the paper’s thrust a little wishy-wash – neither one thing nor the other. Rusike once raised this matter with me, at some point during my various editorships with Modus. There was little need to speculate on the source of this grouse, as far as The Sunday Times was concerned. I responded vigorously in defence of the autonomy of the editor. I did not protest in any undignified, extremist language, but I did hint, though, that an editor who was not assertive in defence of their editorial autonomy was no better than a puppet or a dummy. Dick Hall and Kelvin Mlenga, both strong-filled editors, had taught me that cardinal lesson. In Zimbabwe, the matter had been raised by none other than Willie Musarurwa himself. He had been appointed editor of The Sunday Mail, presumably on the strength of his liberation war credentials. He had remained with Zapu after George Nyandoro and James Chikerema had either been expelled or had quit – I was never briefed, independently, on the reasons for that split, which occurred in the 1970s. The party was then based in Zambia. But xenophobia has been mentioned in the corridors of party power. In 1980, Musarurwa stood for election on a Zapu ticket, but lost. Zapu had won impressively in Matabeleland in the elections leading to independence, but not in Mashonaland. But before he was subsequently removed in 1985 - rather unceremoniously - as editor of the government Sunday paper, Musaruwa had spoken publicly and strongly on the autonomy of an editor, even one on a government newspaper. His view was so strong he had suggested, in an open address, a law which would bar the Minister of Information (or anyone else in the government) from firing the editor of a government newspaper. His dismissal must have come as the biggest shock of his professional life. I met him a number of times after that. He looked subdued, but not entirely daunted or deflated. He seemed to accept his fate stoically. He continued to write powerfully as a columnist for Modus Publications, after Geoff Nyarota had joined that company. I shall always remember Willie as someone who had this incredible capacity to laugh at any situation which others thought was deadly serious. We arrived in Lusaka around the same time in 1963 – he, to work for Zapu and me for The Central African Mail. He had the car and I didn’t. But he always seemed hard-up for cash. One day, after picking me from Matero, the ramshackle township in Lusaka, he knocked down a chicken as he drove us towards the city. The chicken died on the spot. The owners made a big fuss. They demanded compensation in cash. This was particularly after they discovered we did not speak good Nyanja. He just had to pay – or Willie, as the driver, had to pay. He turned to me and said he didn’t have any money. I was aghast: the Zapu representative in Northern Rhodesia had no money? He said quite simply the party was not a bank or a business. So, I had to pay for the chicken. Willie found this extremely funny. The journalist had bailed out the politician – how many times did that happen? I wondered aloud... But, before we both returned home, we were3 to have a particularly unpleasant confrontation in Lusaka. It probably determined our future relationship, even as editors in the same stable.