A time has now come for the scrapping of television and listeners’ licence fees, as they serve no purpose and are an anachronistic relic of the past The government and the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC) have proved to be intransigent to calls for reform and we cannot continue to reward this intransigence by paying licence fees The constitution states that all state-owned media of communication must be free to determine independently the editorial content of their broadcasts or other communications, be impartial and afford fair opportunity for the presentation of divergent views and dissenting opinions However, ZBC is anything but
It is clear that there is no interest to reform ZBC For starters, TV licence fees belong to a bygone era, where state or public broadcasters had a monopoly due to infrastructure costs and the prevailing socio-political contexts ZBC is a relic of the past and the fiefdom of a patronage system and serves only the interests of a few rather than the entire population as envisaged by the law In the digital age we are in, where viewers have many platforms to get content such as streaming platforms like Netflix, YouTube and Spotify, the licence fee only serves to encourage complacency and lack of innovation from ZBC
ZBC knows that they do not have to do anything, they do not have to innovate and above all they do not have to serve the public’s interest, as they will still get money at the end of the day, thanks to the archaic licence fees The writing has been on the wall for the licence fees for a long time, but we are stuck in a time warp where we think because something was effective in 1980 it is still relevant today, notwithstanding the technological changes that have come About two decades ago, our legislature enacted the ZBC Commercialisation Act, which was in part borne by the realisation that licence fees and government grants were not a sustainable method of funding the broadcaster That we continue to pay licence fees yet there is a law that seeks to commercialise ZBC is oxymoronic in nature
A public service broadcaster, which ZBC purports to be, is meant to serve the public regardless of commercial interests Thus, when the government enacted the ZBC Commercialisation Act in 2002, ZBC, by all intents and purposes, ceased to be a public service broadcaster and became a commercial entity and for this reason, we should not be paying licence fees Unfortunately, what we have now is dogmatic ideology that is rigid, inflexible and not amenable to change At the core of this ideology is that ZBC is critical for spreading information to farflung areas
Source: The Standard Zimbabwe
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Source: Thestandard
