Muswere demands ministry enterprises become profitable

Vumba (New Ziana) – Information, Publicity and Broadcasting Services Minister, Dr Jenfan Muswere has demanded that his ministry strategic review workshop come up with ideas to turn parastatals under his ministry’s purview profitable.

The ministry held its strategic review workshop attended by senior government officials and those from the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC), Transmedia, Broadcasting Authority of Zimbabwe (BAZ) and the Zimbabwe Mass Media Trust (ZMMT) this week in Vumba near Mutare.

Setting the agenda for the meeting, Dr Muswere exhorted the officials to come up with viable financial models, including analyzing current legislation for possible amendment to allow the State-owned enterprises to become profitable in their operations.

At the same time, the enterprises needed to critically look at their operations in relation to their mandates, achievements and challenges they faced during the course of the year.

“Each and every parastatal has got a clear mandate. What is the role of the ZBC, what are the shortcomings, what has ZBC achieved, what are the challenges they currently face,” he said.

“Transmedia, what are the challenges, what was achieved last year, what do we intent to achieve, the same goes for BAZ, the same goes also for the ZMMT. We have clear cut mandates but how best do we ensure that we have a functional information, publicity and broadcasting services ecosystem, how do we achieve that, where are we coming from.”

He said the government had adopted the triple P, BOT and BOOT models to allow State enterprises to achieve their goals so it was up to the strategic review workshop to come up with plans to ensure that the country fulfilled the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) regulations by becoming fully digitalized.

“Whatever we are communicating, whenever whichever platform we are using are we getting the information across the country to each and every ward and district?” asked Dr Muswere.

“These are some of the questions that perhaps we need to discuss. We have also discussed about the two-way communication which is also part of our mandate as a ministry, because of digitalisation it’s no longer an issue related to one way communication. Whatever we say, we have to get back the response, the decoding and encoding of information is very important. Yes we have done a lot of irrigation schemes across the country but what is the feedback from the people? What are the genuine concerns around the pfumvudza/intwasa programme” What does the population think about the construction of roads, the dualisation of roads, we need to find a way of getting back all this information.”

For the smooth coordination of tasks and responsibilities, the strategic workshop will come up with, Dr Muswere said the information, publicity and broadcasting services ecosystem need to have good human resources management policies that ensured that employees have better salaries.

New Ziana