Cost and context of media corruption in Zim

In other words, the instances of corruption which publishers and prospective publishers are likely face are presented as opportunities for entrepreneurship, but the investors will not be selling business as such. They will be selling a template, a worldview, within which big-time corruption gets imbedded. This is the most critical form of corruption under which petty retail corruption comes to be treated as normal. So the question for Ncube as publisher has more to do with his relations with Reylander and Anglo-Saxon sanctions than with the MDC formations.


The Sunday Mail


AFRICAN FOCUS
 By Tafataona Mahoso
(This is a continuation of ZIm lost sons and the Anglo-Saxon benefiaciaries of real blood diamonds)
Mr Trevor Ncube — publisher of The Zimbabwe Independent, The Standard and The Mail & Guardian — was reported (on October 15 2010) to have made a curious confession about attempts by MDC-T and MDC-M to corrupt the editorial policies of his papers.
What makes the confession curious to any serious investigator of media corruption in context is the fact that the political parties accused of attempting to bribe and corrupt Mr Ncube have themselves admitted that they are foreign-funded projects of the Anglo-Saxon powers, especially the British and the North Americans. So what does it mean for Mr Ncube to refuse to be influenced by someone else’s foreign-funded project? Of all the forces who have corrupted the media in our region, why did Mr Ncube single out only the two MDC formations? 
Ncube’s confession should be treated as a decoy focusing on derivative, retail, corruption efforts in order to hide the more systematic, wholesale corruption strategies involving USAID, George Soros, SIDA, DANIDA, NORAD, the US National Endowment for Democracy, the World Bank Institute, the Netherlands Institute for Southern Africa, and the US Centre for International Media Assistance. 
For example, Mr Ncube could have explained why former Swedish Ambassador to Zimbabwe Mr Sten Rylander officially launched Ncube’s paper NewsDay on September 28 2009.
 That paper did not have a licence and it was not registered until May of the following year, 2010. Throughout his tenure as Swedish ambassador here, Sten Rylander was the most hawkish promoter and defender of the illegal Anglo-Saxon sanctions destroying the people’s livelihoods on a daily basis.
In other words, the instances of corruption which publishers and prospective publishers are likely face are presented as opportunities for entrepreneurship, but the investors will not be selling business as such.
 They will be selling a template, a worldview, within which big-time corruption gets imbedded. 
This is the most critical form of corruption under which petty retail corruption comes to be treated as normal. So the question for Ncube as publisher has more to do with his relations with Rylander and Anglo-Saxon sanctions than with the MDC formations.
As Steven Box once wrote in his book Power, Crime and Mystification:
“Corporate crime is rendered invisible by its complex and sophisticated planning and execution, by non-existent or weak law enforcement and prosecution, and by lenient legal and social sanctions which fail to reaffirm or reinforce collective (majority) sentiments on moral boundaries. In addition, the type of media to which the majority of people expose themselves under-reports corporate crime.” 
The weakest link in Zimbabwe’s fight against foreign destabilisation and illegal sanctions has been the derivative African petty-bourgeois class. That class went along with the imposition of illegal sanctions because it bought the Anglo-Saxon lie that the sanctions were targeted on individuals and would therefore spare the economy while destroying the liberation movement in government. On October 7 2010, Prime Minister Tsvangirai, speaking as MDC-T leader, went back to that widely despised and clearly treasonous denial of the reality of sanctions, saying:
“All Zimbabweans know that Mr Mugabe and his colleagues brought the restrictive measures (meaning illegal Anglo-Saxon sanctions) on themselves through the flagrant abuses of human rights and the economic disaster which they inflicted on this country. 
“All Zimbabweans know that these restrictive measures are the result, not the cause of that economic disaster.”
Now, in any normal national environment where people respect themselves and value their lives and livelihoods, the mass media alone would have forced the Prime Minister not only to apologise but also to resign.
 The muted responses we got to Mr Tsvangirai’s outrage is a measure of the corruption of both worldview and daily practice in the media industry and the corporate sector.
In the campaigns for the March 29 harmonised elections in 2008, the MDC formations and their NGO supporters told voters that there were no Western sanctions against Zimbabwe, except for the targeted travel bans against Zanu-PF “bigwigs.” 
The only real economic sanctions there were in Zimbabwe were imposed especially on rural communities by the Government and Zanu-PF when they prevented NGOs from operating freely among the people and giving them humanitarian assistance in the form of food rations, medicines, clothes and even agricultural inputs.
This evil and cynical opposition explanation of sanctions was helped by the fact that those leading the Zanu-PF campaign for March 29 refused to make sanctions a priority issue, just as those engaged in dialogue with the MDC formations in South Africa at the time had also not made sanctions a priority issue. 
The proposals on how to make sanctions an important issue were always there from the rank and file of the party, as became evident in the second round of inter-party talks and in the campaign for the Presidential run-off election on June 27 2008.
However, the damage to rural opinion done by the MDC formations, the media and NGOs in the run-up to March 29 2008 has still not been fully repaired.
 That is why Mr Tsvangirai could afford to repeat that same lie about sanctions on October 7 2010.
Another paradox is that the individuals, groups, institutions and sectors — who should have been the most sensitive to any idea of sanctions and the most perceptive about the implications of any and all sanctions — did absolutely nothing to explain or to fight the illegal sanctions until too late.