THE Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Transport Communications raised a serious query with the Broadcasting Authority of Zimbabwe (BAZ) last week. Its stated intention was to try and find out why BAZ has not issued any broadcasting licences with the special mention of community radio stations.

The acting chairperson of BAZ, Pikirayi Deketeke, attempted a public image stunt by issuing a statement through a newspaper that he edits, claiming that the BAZ was reviewing the Broadcasting Services Act (BSA) because none of the applicants for licences that were announced late last year had met the requirements specified by the Act.

An interesting point here is that the BSA does not mention that the BAZ shall have the powers to review the Act that establishes it except perhaps under direct instruction from the responsible minister, but this might be beside the point. My intention in this article is to analyse the paralysis of the BSA, not necessarily in legal terms but in relation to the politics that it has allowed to play out over the last five years since its inception, and to place the comments of the portfolio committee into perspective.

The first point that must be made has become a little too obvious but cannot be avoided. The events that informed the promulgation of the BSA are all too clear. During Jonathan Moyo's tenure as a junior minister in the President's Office, there was the intention to launch what was then called Capital Radio by some journalists that had been dismissed from the then Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC). These journalists decided to challenge the monopoly of ZBC as unconstitutional in terms of Section 20 of the Constitution that guarantees freedom of expression. The Supreme Court found in their favour but recommended that the government must set up regulations that facilitated the end of the monopoly of ZBC, an issue that the government agreed to.

Because Capital Radio had essentially won the case, they proceeded with their intention to broadcast and this brought the wrath of Moyo, who personally led a group of anti-riot police officers to shut the station down at a Harare hotel. This was prior to government coming up with the stipulated regulations.

The government then used the Presidential Powers Temporary Measures Act to issue Broadcasting Regulations in the format of the current BSA today. And these regulations were in no way indicative of the government's intention to facilitate the introduction of private or community broadcasters as had been ruled by the Supreme Court. These regulations eventually became the BSA in 2000.

The processes that led to the making into law of the BSA are therefore informative in two specific respects. First, the government was somewhat arm-twisted into coming up with a broadcasting regulatory act when it never had the intention to do so. Second, that the government has deliberately stalled the introduction of private and public operators in the broadcasting industry, despite passing the Act because it is averse to having diverse voices challenging its narrowly derived nationalist message through its Zimbabwe Broadcasting Holdings (ZBH).

And it is this that brings the work of the portfolio committee on transport and communications into critical perspective. When it made the comments through its chairman, Leo Mugabe, that it intends to find out why there have been no new radio or TV stations, with specific mention of community radio stations, freedom of expression activists might have felt a slight tinge of hope that this might after all be a trailblazing committee, seeking to right the wrongs done to the media profession. While optimism generally runs the risk of being misplaced; the committee is at least bringing a lot of dirty linen into the sphere of parliamentary debate, once it completes its survey and its queries about the media profession.

It, however, needs to take into greater consideration not just the issue of the performance of statutory media bodies but instead must take into greater account the establishing acts of these same said institutions. The BSA, for its entire claim to be providing regulation of the broadcasting industry, is an act that is a nightmare for any budding broadcaster. It limits the possibility of a broadcaster receiving foreign funding (and here one can assume that would include the acquisition of equipment from outside the country), seeks to guarantee airtime on each established private station for government propaganda and is largely run with containment and not promotion of freedom of expression in mind. Admittedly, amendments have been made to the BSA with the rare democratic feat of changing the Act to stop the responsible minister from being the licensing authority, but that is essentially a piecemeal amendment because the essential framework of the legislation remains the same.

To conclude, it is apparent that the parliamentary portfolio committee on transport and communications must seriously begin to look at the possibility of seeking an overhaul of the BSA to make it more democratic and to try to bring together both telecommunications regulation with broadcasting regulation for efficiency and diversity. In doing this, it must not merely be guided by parliamentary protocol, but must instead begin to think with the people of Zimbabwe in mind.