One of the resolutions of the Victoria Falls Retreat was the reform and liberalisation of the media in Zimbabwe.

Freeing the airwaves should be a lot quicker than tackling the outrageous levels of unemployment or other infrastructural problems.

Perhaps the irony inherent in this BBC report doesn’t register in the minds of our reform promising politicians.

Inside the bars, the politicians mingled and cracked jokes. As the retreat drew to a close, a musical show was staged by a popular local Sungura musician, Tongayi Moyo. After feasting on a buffet, the ministers took to the dance floor, outside the elegant pool gardens of the hotel, next to the golf course. And Tongayi Moyo belted out his song “Things Must Change / Political Violence”, which is banned by the state broadcaster. The lyrics say: “You can’t continue practising violence for long, it will come to haunt you.” “The most decorated of military officers have their time, they won’t be saluted forever,” the song goes, adding “violence has its time, things must change”. Zanu PF ministers may not have been paying much attention to the lyrics. But they danced along anyway. Read more

Clearly its a case of It’s My Party and I’ll Dance If I Want To, because c’mon, we should all be able to turn the volume up on our radios and dance to Tongayi.

Media freedom, which is also one of the promises of the Global Political Agreement, is not being delivered on.

What other promises do you want to make sure are kept? Keep the politicians accountable. Contact JOMIC, the body responsible for monitoring adherence to the agreement on wncube (at) africaonline (dot) co (dot) zw  and cc funsthole (at) yahoo (dot) com

This entry was posted on April 8th, 2009 at 2:31 pm by Bev Clark and is filed under Activism, Governance, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.