I recently attended Joburg Radio Days, a conference which brings together radio practitioners from across the continent to share ideas and their work with each other. One of the issues under discussion was the prospect of broadcasting reform in Zimbabwe, while another session was devoted to community radio.

The Zimbabwean speakers described the legislative framework, which based on the guarantee to freedom of expression as enunciated in clause 20 and amendment 19 of the current constitution should allow for a multiplicity of voices on the airwaves. Zenzele Ndebele from Radio Dialogue was passionate in making his case for the need for community radio. State media, he said, did not allow space for Zimbabwe’s cultural diversity; neither did it represent the interests of small communities. Rather ZBC gave a platform to political interests and because of its limited capacity to broadcast to all Zimbabweans left much of the population without any access to information.

Having attended several conferences and workshops with this theme, I am a little weary of talking about it. The inclusive government of which ZANU PF has the lion’s share of power has reneged on amendment 19 of the constitution and has failed to implement broadcasting reform. This is undeniable.  There is still much work to be done in creating an environment that is conducive to the creation of a free and independent media. I feel that we should spend more time figuring out either alternative ways to get information to those without access, or finding middle ground with ZANU PF policy makers in order to make media freedom a reality.

Not that the policymakers themselves are much help. Confronted with questions about why media freedom was so slow in coming to Zimbabwe, the Zimbabwe Media Commissions representative to the Forum, Ambassador Chris Mutsvangwa could not give a definitive answer. Instead he gave us his war credentials and insisted he was a highly educated Constitutional lawyer.

His response is typical of the party line; where supposedly educated policy makers sidestep the issue at hand and foaming at the mouth reiterate that they freed us from colonialism and we are an ungrateful lot for daring to question our elders. We as a nation are unable to move forward because they as leaders are caught in a time trap of justifying an untenable grip on power. It’s all very well to have liberated the country from Western imperialists, but that revolution, the creation of a successful and proud Zimbabwean nation, is not over yet.

Sisonke Msimang, is the Excutive Director of OSISA. Here she writes about the challenges of leading a large organisation.

True leadership has no gender

In 2008 I was appointed as the director of a fairly large funding and advocacy organisation. With a staff of 60 and a budget of about R180-million, I was more than a little intimidated. I was younger than my colleagues in senior management and had just had a baby. And, of course, I was a woman working in the notoriously male-dominated sector of human rights and governance.

I was a nervous wreck. How on Earth would I do this?

My instinct was to focus on what I was good at. I have been involved in work on gender and women’s rights since the beginning of my career. I thought I would make my mark by turning our workplace into a model for gender equity.

I imagined I could try out some ideas regarding flexitime and introduce more child-friendly policies. I had grand ideas about challenging people to appreciate that long hours in the office did not necessarily translate into higher productivity. And I wanted to ensure that female employees felt free from sexual harassment and that male employees understood the boundaries and were encouraged to contribute towards an organisation striving for gender equity.

I would make myself available to female staff members by listening to their problems and mentoring and coaching them through difficulties.

All this would be in addition to the daily work of driving strategic direction, keeping an eye on finances, managing a diverse and engaged board of trustees, monitoring the political temperature in our 10 countries of operation and responding to requests for analysis and information from colleagues in Budapest, London, Brussels and New York.

It became evident quite early on that (a) the gender utopia I thought I might achieve simply was not the most pressing organisational need of the moment; (b) given who I was (young, black, female) the pressure to be excellent was intense; and (c) once you are the boss, not many people are interested in sharing their problems. When they are, it’s usually with a view to wriggling out of some obligation. So I nixed the mentor idea.

I realised that if I focused all my time and energy on being a strong “woman” leader, I would not be making very strategic use of my time. I would also be sending a message that I was hired because I was a woman, not because I was a woman who could do the job.

So, much as I understood that relegating gender to the category of “soft” issues was problematic, there was no getting around the fact that others would read any preoccupation with gender as precisely that: an inability to deal with the core issues of the job.

The organisation did not need a gender warrior. It needed a higher degree of internal accountability. This required less of the kinder, gentler woman’s-touch approach and more of the hard-nosed tactics often associated with men. It required confronting people, paying close attention to detail on institutional policy, looking closely at the audit and it required me to say no – very often to men older and more educated than I am. It also demanded of me an ability to let people go if they were undermining the institution.

By the end of my first 18 months, I had had no cosy chats and certainly didn’t feel as though I was bringing any kind of feminine sensibility to the workplace. It was a tense time. I was not turning out to be the feminist leader I had hoped I would be.

Yet there were also clearly a number of ways in which I was acting out classic female leadership traits. I spent a lot of time in the office. The organisation needed a manager focused on in-house matters. In some ways I was playing into the classic gender binary: women spend time within the boundaries of the compound, as it were, whereas men go out there and conquer the world.

In time I learned to use every minute during regular working hours wisely. I cut lunches short, seldom lingered to chat in corridors and turned the BlackBerry on at about 8pm so that I could respond to my colleagues in New York, who began to send messages just as I was getting home at 5pm.

There is no question that a man in my position who had chosen to spend less time in the office might have been viewed as an underperformer. I was given more leeway and there was less pressure on me from my colleagues because they knew I had a small child. It is complicated to be a woman with children who chooses career and family. The costs of trying to juggle are high.

Today the institution I help to manage has grown. It has a staff of 87 and its budget is about R250-million. It operates on a range of human rights and governance issues, from monitoring the conduct of mining companies in poor communities and sensitive ecosystems to supporting litigation related to human rights abuses in countries as diverse as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Swaziland and Malawi.

The organisation is no longer tension-filled. I have become a more relaxed leader.

Those early hard-nosed decisions have paid off. People understand that accountability is key and so there is far more peer monitoring. People have largely bought into the broad vision we have of a region in which change starts with us.

I have two children now. I still have not had time to sit down and have any of those mentorship conversations I thought I would. But I feel younger colleagues, both men and women, have learned a few things from me by watching.

We have no more women in leadership positions today than we did when I started the job. But I am proud to say that we have incredibly progressive maternity and paternity leave policies.

Women who have given birth are entitled to six months paid leave and men whose primary partner has had a child are entitled to three months paid leave, taken within the first year of the child’s life. Staff members who choose to adopt are similarly entitled. We have also paid careful attention to creating an environment that is free of sexual harassment.

I have learned an incredible amount in the past three years. In spite of all my misgivings and concern about whether or not I would be respected simply because of my age and my gender, I have been provided with the type of support many managers can only dream of. It wasn’t automatic and it should not have been. But I felt that as I learned, I began to earn respect.

You do not become a leader by virtue of the position you occupy. Every day in my job, I am reminded that you become a leader because those you work with for a common cause give you permission to lead.

In an organisation that is brimming with talent and intellect, I have been provided with the permission to lead. I have been allowed to make mistakes and to pick myself up and try again.

My dreams of turning the organisation into a gender experiment have given way to a more realistic but no less lofty set of goals: to ensure that we build a Southern African institution in which the values of hard work, integrity and authenticity are embodied by a team of women and men committed to a more transparent and accountable region.

That a woman happens to lead the team is both essential and completely incidental. I have learned to live with the contradictions that come with the territory.

Sisonke Msimang is the executive director of the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa. This is an edited version of her essay that appears in the Mail & Guardian’s Book of South African Women

Zimbabwe’s Sunday Mail, the nation’s so-called leading family newspaper, has yet again proved how insensitive and unprofessional it is. Choosing to ignore vociferous criticism for carrying a horrendous photograph of one of the victims of the recent fuel tanker accident, they went on to republish the same photograph on page 5 of their newspaper this weekend. Clearly the Sunday Mail is keen to publicise charred human remains. How do you like your corpse? Medium, well done or scorched. Just ask the Sunday Mail.

With yet another horrific Zimbabwean traffic accident, Chris Kabwato’s most recent piece carries extra weight. Make yourself a cup of coffee and read his fine writing:

AS ONE drives on our country’s highways (highway here being a polite term for those dangerous pot-holed paths that connect our cities) there is one thing that one gets used to: the sight of a broken down bus. As one who literally grew up plying the Mutare-Harare route on a Tenda or Kukura Kurerwa bus, I know the pain and despair when the bus gives up the ghost. But it seems to be happening just too often nowadays.

In 1992, because of my mad love for soccer, I used to take the first bus out on a Sunday morning and do the 265km journey to Harare to watch Reinhard Fabisch’s Warriors slaughteringTruck/bus other national teams. At one time the bus of choice for us was called “Scud Mabasa” and it was driven by an equally crazy man who wore a permanent huge grin which pretty much resembled the front grill of his blue and white machine. Serious.

Immediately after the game it was a mad rush to Msasa to try to catch the last Tenda bus. If you missed that then it was the gonyeti ­– long-distance trucks. Believe me these were a nightmare in themselves – the drivers were always garrulous, slow and overly keen on stopping and piling more passengers into that small cabin. One time I jumped onto a gonyeti driven by a man who had a severe tummy problem. I will spare you the details but you can imagine how many times we had to stop and the driver would rush into the nearby bush…

Now where am I going with this road tale? Each week we are buffeted by events that bring contradictory emotions in us – the economy is re-bounding we are told and at the same time some people behave like Nazi blackshirts and storm parliament. The result can be that feeling of uncertainty that comes whenever you jump on any of our “chicken” buses.

To get a perspective on uncertainties our country throws at us, let’s go on a journey on the Pungwe Star bus from Mabiya to Chigodora. You board the bus – not because that is the one you really want – but the touts at the terminus do not give you a choice. They seize your bag and the next thing your Monarch suitcase is on the roof being bundled with other luggage. For that involuntary service the “hwindi” will demand a tip or else… Ask yourself if this is too different from being frog-marched to an election booth and being told where to place your “X”.

Once on the bus you will discover that the bus is like a mini-country – there are all sorts of people there – women, men, children…But like in the real world you will be forced to cohabit with strange characters – the young boy who opens his “skaf-tin” to take out two boiled eggs and salt wrapped in khaki paper. The woman who buys mealie cobs, misses the window as she tries to throws the sheaves and messes up your Michael Jackson red and black leather jacket. The drunkard who piles in sorghum beer, washes it down with some lagers and forgets there is no loo on the bus (he will later shout himself hoarse for “Recess, driver!”)

The bus conductor is a greasy character that all passengers are in awe of (very much a mini-Joseph Chinotimba or Jabulani Sibanda). He has not given anyone their change – he has written what’s due to you on your ticket and he will sort out the change when he feels like. Should you complain rather loudly he threatens to stop the bus and chuck you out – right there in the middle of the msasa bush.

There will be roadblocks – countless stops by officers asking for the same things over and over again. For the bus crew roadblocks are like toll-gates…

The inevitable tyre puncture happens (could this be the equivalent of inflation?) It is discovered that the spare tyre has no pressure and also it is a “snake” (it is worn out). Worse still, the hydraulic jack is missing. The wait begins. The povo does not have a clue if a spare bus will be sent. No one knows if the driver has called for help after all he had said his cellphone had no airtime… Just like a country there is no plan B.

All that people can say on their phones to anxious relatives is the dramatic – “Bhazi rafa” (literally, the bus has died). When the bus dies no one gets a refund. It’s like contributing to a public housing fund and the next thing you know some clever folk have swindled you of your money and built themselves mansions.

But it could be worse – an accident could happen. At one time we seemed to be on a mission to kill our farmers – think Dande Bus Disaster 1982 (61 farmers killed), Chivake Bus Disaster 1989 (78 farmers perished) and we had to add schoolchildren too with 80 killed in the 1991 Nyanga Bus Disaster (the overall total was 87).

Can we safely declare 2008 to be our worst year in living memory –the year of when the locust ate the economy and politics contrived to deny the will of the people? Was this our Nyanga Bus Disaster?

Or maybe we avoided a total disaster but we have the unique arrangement of three drivers who constantly argue about who should be at the wheel and where the bus should be going? The third driver is content to be just called a driver.

In any case the Zimbabwe bus is heading towards an uncertain destination. Maybe one day the passengers shall take matters into their own hands and demand to be delivered home – safe and kenge? For now the bus croaks on…

I heard the other a man say to another: “Don’t speak to me in Shona. When you are here in Bulawayo speak to me in Ndebele.” The other guy said, “Okay, let’s speak in English then,” to which the first guy retorted, “How can you expect me to speak English that comes all the way from Britain when I cannot speak Shona here in Zimbabwe.”

I couldn’t figure whether this was just buddy-based banter or this was indeed a no nonsense exchange, yet it raised once again the emotions that surround the issue of language in Bulawayo where there is an increasing outcry by Ndebele-speakers concerning how the language is being decimated. The first guy’s response was exactly what got senior Zanu PF official Joshua Malinga into trouble when he told off a cop who had addressed him in Shona. Malinga fumed and told the cop that he had no business addressing him in that language here in Bulawayo.  He was promptly arrested.

The other day, a letter writer to one of the dailies complained about the wrong Ndebele spellings on the Zimbabwean passport. Again the other day, one was complaining about place names carried in street signs about the appalling misspellings. Inevitably for many here, this has been interpreted as part of a grand agenda to render the Ndebele language second class and this among other things is what no doubt has given “secessionists” here ammunition to call for self-rule or whatever. Yet you just have to ask yourself what is simmering underneath because we know what has happened elsewhere based on violated tribal and ethnic sensibilities.

The next question of course is how are the country’s political leaders themselves reading this obviously divisive issue of language especially at a time when we already know that some of them have traded barbs labeling each other tribalists.  You do get the sense that this is an extension of the troubles of the 1980s which the government men who choose to explain “salutes” instead are so reluctant to address. Touché.

A photograph from a street in America. Similar graffiti in Zimbabwe please, to remind us that those in power are taking us for a ride.
From: Dangerous Minds