At the Matapi flats in Harare’s Mbare township, among the poorest of the poor, satellite dishes crowd the cracked walls and blocked gutters. Even here, television matters.
Zimbabweans are desperate to see an end to the 30-year monopoly of state broadcaster, the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC). But those hopes have now been dashed.
President Robert Mugabe’s spokesperson, George Charamba, has declared that anyone who hopes private broadcasters will be allowed soon is “building a pie in the sky”.
The statement comes nine years after the Supreme Court struck down the ZBC’s monopoly.
Free airwaves looks like another pledge on which the unity government will not deliver.
The propaganda
ZBC represents everything Zimbabweans most hate about their country: the propaganda, hatred and often comical backwardness of their leaders.
An evening’s viewing usually starts with music videos featuring large women wrapped in bright-coloured Zanu-PF outfits, shaking their fists and rumps in praise of the Dear Leader.
On prime-time talk shows ageing academics excitedly trade conspiracy theories on anything from Salvador Allende’s agrarian revolution in Chile to 1960s’ American space programmes.
News bulletins are a window on the Mugabe personality cult. Every reference to him must be prefaced by his full title, “head of state and government and commander-in-chief of the Zimbabwe defence forces”.
With the Zanu-PF annual conference imminent, bored anchors drawl through repeated headlines telling which new district has followed other patriots by pledging support for Mugabe’s continued leadership of the party.
In spite of all this, Happison Muchechetere, the head of the ZBC, told The Standard newspaper that he believes his station is “far better than DStv”.
‘Good money’
Helping Zimbabweans escape all this is good business.
Hordes of small-time dealers make good money selling satellite dishes and decoders imported from China and Dubai.
For $50 these now allow millions to illegally watch foreign channels. Faults are fixed for $10. Long lines form at DStv dealerships.
At flea markets bootleg DVDs of the latest Hollywood movies fly off the shelves for as little as a dollar.
Demand is so high that the most enterprising DVD pirate, known as “Jack Sparrow”, has become a Robin Hood figure in Harare, with his army of hawkers pushing boxes of cut-price bootlegs while dodging arrest.
The investors
Zimbabwe had television in 1960, 16 years before South Africa and nearly 40 years before Malawi.
You wouldn’t know it: transmission is poor and the station is seeking Iranian money to modernise.
The Iranians have seen to it that ZBC flights prime-time features on Iranian art, while South Korean soaps, donated by the embassy, also have prime slots.
There are alternatives. Each evening, transistor radios crackle short-wave broadcasts from pro-opposition stations run from abroad by exiled Zimbabwean journalists. But the risk is high. This week, one of the stations, Radio VOP, reported that militia north of Harare had seized radios from villagers.
Deserted by advertisers, the ZBC is aggressively wringing $50 licence fees from viewers. ZBC “licence inspectors” in brightly coloured aprons wielding large receipt books, stalk shopping malls and lie in wait at police roadblocks, demanding car radio licences.
During home visits, they run the gauntlet of insults, even dogs. For protection, they move around with police.