THE JOURNALIST AS A PARTY HACK

By Bill Saidi
IN the 17 years I worked as a journalist in Zambia, I spent only two and a half years working on a privately-owned newspaper, The Central African Mail. I was never forced to belong to any political party. The rest of the years I worked for newspapers owned, lock, stock and barrel, by the government, The Times of Zambia, a daily, and its Sunday sister, The Sunday Times of Zambia.
I was once “urged” to join and did join the ruling party, the United National Independence Party, UNIP. In 1975, when I was fired as deputy editor–in-chief of Times Newspapers, I was described as a ”leader” of the party. But I had fallen by the wayside, hence my dismissal. When I was reinstated in 1977, there was no mention of the restoration of my UNIP membership. For very good reasons, I didn’t myself pursue the matter at all.
I had never thought of myself as a “party hack”. The Oxford dictionary describes a hack as “a writer producing dull and unoriginal work” You can only imagine, with deep loathing, what a party hack gets up to.
On my return to an independent Zimbabwe, I worked for less than a year for what passed for an independent newspaper, The Herald. In 1980, when I joined them, they had shed the “Rhodesia” in the `title. This was perfectly understandable. After all, the country was no longer “Rhodesia”, an odious name associated with Cecil John Rhodes. This self-absorbed imperialist, capitalist adventurer had plundered the country’s wealth for the mother country, imperialist Britain. Rhodes’ beneficiaries had decided, when the chips were down for their retention of any power at all, to accept the strange name Zimbabwe-Rhodesia. Nobody in and out of the country believed there would be any permanence accruing to that name.
Both Bishop Muzorewa and Ian Smith, at the helm of this double-barrel-named country, must have known, by 1979, that Zimbabwe would win. They would both lose.
By 1981, the government of Robert Mugabe had taken over Zimbabwe Newspapers, the parent company. It was formerly called the Rhodesia Printing and Publishing Co. (Pvt) Limited. This was the Rhodesian stake of the huge South African conglomerate, The Argus Group. This company was founded in apartheid South Africa. It is not defamatory to say of them that they were fellow travellers of the apartheid regime from start to finish.
Yet, after the end of apartheid, there was no rush by the new rulers to “nationalize” the media. There is a dark spot on that front: the South African Broadcasting Corporation remains government-owned. It’s an anomaly which many critics believe may return to haunt the government of the ANC-Cosatu alliance. If the rationale is based on the ownership of such media by the governments of the USA, Britain, Germany, France and other Western governments, it doesn’t sit well with the claim of an entirely free media dispensation, as opposed to that during apartheid.
It’s no surprise that SABC has been the target of many barbs since 1994. The criticism is entirely justified. Can anyone believe SABC will always “tell it like is”, even if a story, based on the sacred facts, scandalises the government?
The same must apply to all the other state-owned radio and TV stations in Africa today. The first governments, it seemed to me at the start, wished to deliver an unmistakable message to the people: we are in charge because we won independence. We call the shots.
Some of them have countered criticism of their ownership of the airwaves by quoting the examples of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and The Voice of America
(VOA). Both are government-owned. The BBC is run under a charter, but that the government in power calls the shots is incontestable. The controls may be subtle, but there are there, as present as the nose on your face.
But in Africa, the control is so emphatic; nobody is in any doubt that the editor is under orders from the top. The editors may not be qualified as “party hacks”. But that could only be a matter of semantics:
In my first job in Northern Rhodesia at The Central African Mail, the takeover by the government was nakedly a change of the palace guard. Nothing would be published henceforth, unless it was manifestly supportive of the government.
Most African journalists since 1957 – the year of Ghana’s independence – have confronted this dilemma head-on: are they or they are not party hacks? Most of them ended up working for a government or a ruling party newspaper. I met many of them andf was under no illusions that they shared my discomfort; telling the truth and nothing but the truth was going to be problematical under those circumstances.
The new governments aped Ghana’s example. The ruling party or the government owned most of the newspapers. The State owned radio and television. In a one-party system of government, there was little room for genuine independent newspapers, radio or TV stations.
Kenya was an early exception. The Daily Nation was owned by the Agar Khan
In 1971, I met its then editor, Boaz Omori, on my very first visit to Kenya. He struck me as an honest, no-nonsense journalist. We had a long chat in his office. I was then on The Times of Zambia, the author of a regular weekly column. I had enormous respect for Boaz Omori. A few years later, he was dead. Friends in Nairobi, who I met elsewhere at conferences, suspected he had been “done in” by government agents. I was aghast at the implication. But as time passed, I realized this was not as outlandish as it sounded.
Since then, a number of African editors have died in circumstances which most people suspect could be described as “suspicious”.
Before I left Zambia in 1980, there had been a report, never actually confirmed by independent sources, that one senior UNIP politician was hunting for me with a rifle. Fortunately for me, it sounded totally hare-brained. It’s true I had been publicly denounced by President |Kaunda at a news conference at State House in Lusaka. He had asked the rhetorical question: “Why doesn’t he go back his country?”
All doubts about the government’s intention to “own” the journalists were removed when, at a briefing by an influential member of Kaunda’s cabinet, we had been urged to act as spies for the government. It was part of our task to safeguard the independence of the country. I am still to be convinced that the ownership of the media by the government is a legitimate attempt to safeguard the integrity and independence of the country – and not to destroy any opportunity for the opposition to receive a fair coverage of its activities.
In Zimbabwe, my moment of truth came when I was appointed editor of The Sunday News in Bulawayo. Before the government takeover of Zimpapers, an abortive attempt had been made by the old owners to have me installed as editor of The Sunday Mail. It flopped when Willie Musarurwa got the nod ahead of me. I suppose we should have been grateful for small mercies – at least I had been appointed editor of The Sunday Mail’s poor cousin, The Sunday News.
At the time, Tommy Sithole was editor of The Chronicle. We knew each other from a visit he had made to Ndola while I was deputy editor-in-chief of Times Newspapers. Sithole was then the sports editor of the Tanzanian government newspaper, The Daily News. At Zimpapers, he was senior to me – or so I figured, from the way he treated me. I doubt if he could ever dispute the sequence of events which occurred when I arrived in Bulawayo. At that time, there was little love lost betwween the two parties of the coalition government, Zanu and Zapu. Sithole suggested to me, seriously, that I ought to join Zanu, for my own good and for own safety. I am Shona-speaking. I could therefore be considered a member or, at the least, a sympathizer of Zanu. My guarantee of safety was to join the party. After much soul-searching, I did join the party and was elected secretary of a branch in Hillside, a middleclass suburb of Bulawayo.
Most of the branch members were domestic workers. Although my life was never in any sort of danger from Zapu, my membership of Zanu was frowned upon by many in the party who knew my background, particularly in Zambia. Most suspected I was a fifth columnist of some sort. What they couldn’t decide was whether or not I was enough of a threat to the party that I ought to be publicly flushed out and probably flogged in public for my temerity.
I relinquished by membership when I returned to Harare. I have no idea to this day whether my name is still on the membership register of the party in Bulawayo or in Harare. All I know is that I continued to be a journalist, entirely unencumbered by any loyalty to any political party – which probably explains my I have made no real headway in the fraternity – so far as the conventional meaning of “success” in the profession is concerned.