A new newspaper aims to fill a gaping hole at the heart of Zimbabwe’s media market, reports Richard Saunders
A new independent newspaper will hit Zimbabwe’s streets next week in an effort to keep alive a faltering voice in the national press.
The Zimbabwe Independent, a business-oriented weekly, comes in the wake of a crisis in the independent press which has seen many publications disappear or teeter on the brink of financial collapse.
After blossoming in the wake of political liberalisation in the late Eighties, Zimbabwe’s celebrated private sector press has been buffeted in the Nineties by the strong winds of economic reform.
High interest rates, soaring production costs and restricted consumer demand led to shrinking margins. As a result the commercial foundations of the private sector press have been severely eroded, and the scope and national reach of published opinion has narrowed. Zimbabweans might now feel freer to criticise government and debate national policy, but there are few places where their voices can be heard.
After a flurry of publishing activity featuring a rash of new titles in the early Nineties, Zimbabwe’s publishing giants reasserted themselves. Today the market is dominated more than ever by Zimpapers, the publicly owned government-controlled chain which publishes six papers, including four weeklies and the country’s only two dailies.
But, whereas Zimpapers wields unchallenged command of market share, it no longer leads opinion.
”In the early Nineties ordinary Zimbabweans had a brief taste of a free press, and they liked it,” says Independent assistant editor Iden Wetherall.
”Since then space has opened in the media market, because the broad readership has become more sophisticated. Zimbabweans will no longer accept news which is hidden, distorted or massaged by editors unashamedly beholden to the government.”
Zimpapers’ primary unearned advantage rests in the fact there are few alternatives.
A clutch of smaller monthlies and weeklies, addressing themselves to narrower communities, have mostly shied away from trying to establish a broad national presence. A limited set of popular magazines, which have been more politically adventurous, have had muted impact because of their limited publication frequency and distribution.
On the other hand, newspapers which have tried to break the Zimpapers monopoly have been confronted by the enormous and rising costs involved – and by a government jealous off its privileged access to the national press.
The latest victim of tightening margins and the ruling party’s political sensitivities is Modus Publications, where spiralling debt fuelled by punishing interest rates forced the closure of two papers and the editorial reining-in of a third, the respected Financial Gazette.
Once a leading exponent of critical opinion and debate, the Gazette’s editorial independence gradually fell prey to demands from Modus’s owners, themselves under pressure from their creditors at the government- controlled Zimbank.
In the wake of management’s increasing admonition to ease up on criticism of the government and ruling party, Gazette editor Trevor Ncube and several other senior editorial staff left the paper this year.
Since then, Modus has struggled to maintain the Gazette’s traditional readership and advertising base. Staff and infrastructure have been pared back sharply, in a desperate attempt to cut costs and stay afloat.
All of this – the financial collapse of Modus and the political crumbling of Zimpapers’ legitimacy – has left a gaping hole at the heart of the Zimbabwean newspaper market, which the Independent aims to fill.
With solid capital, management and editorial resources (including a translocated senior editorial team from Modus, headed by former Gazette editor Ncube), there is a good chance it will succeed. Nonetheless, the paper’s backing raises questions about where the Independent’s support comes from, and which national voice it represents.
The Independent’s leading investors, Clive Murphy and Clive Wilson, have been important players in the local industry since the Eighties, when both were involved in the ownership and management of the Gazette. In 1989 they sold their controlling interest in Modus to the company’s curent owners, a consortium of black businessmen led by former Zimpapers CEO, Elias Rusike. In the following years Murphy and Wilson consolidated a new publishing company and developed a national distribution agency, both of which will now help support the Independent.
If the origins of the paper’s capital backing expose it to populist attacks from government and an increasingly militant black business ”indigenisation” lobby, the composition of the Independent’s editorial staff make it difficult to sustain this line of criticism.
The editorial team insists it has been given firm guarantees of editorial autonomy by the Independent’s owners, and that the previous editorial line developed during tenure at the black-owned Modus will be maintained. That stance included support for meaningful ”black empowerment” measures, as well as government’s punishing economic reform programme.
But both these positions may well become sticking points for the Independent in the current era of indigenisation politics, which has seen pressure groups calling for the rapid indigenisation of the economy.