A leaked damning report on Alpha Media Holdings (AMH) has exposed rot at the company, accentuated by spooky manoeuvres of former editor-in-chief Wisdom Mdzungairi who quit in a huff after a scandal exploded in his face amid stunning revelations that he is secretly on the government payroll.
AMH is owned by local publisher Trevor Ncube and President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s son-in-law Gerald Mlotshwa. It is run by chief executive Kenias Mafukidze, who is also a board member of the state-owned National Railways of Zimbabwe.
The dramatic events at AMH have laid bare the decay at the company due to extended periods of mismanagement at what used to be an authoritative publishing group, now reduced to a playground for agents of media capture.
Mdzungairi resigned from the NewsDay under a cloud of controversy as he did at the state-controlled Herald over a decade ago where he left as deputy news editor amid tensions after he had hijacked a reporter’s trip to Zambia and kept a company pool car at home while it was urgently needed at work.
As a result, he clashed with top management and was forced to leave, later joining the NewsDay in 2010.
The CIO report, done in October last year, said there are serious internal problems at AMH, one of the biggest media groups in the country, particularly a chronic financial crisis which has disrupted critical operations, affecting staff morale and work ethic in the process. Only last week, workers were refusing to knuckle down without pay.
Paying workers peanuts, and almost always late at that, is a perennial problem at the AMH. Insiders describe it as a cancer. Mdzungairi reportedly told one of his close friends it was one of the issues which drove him to seek secret jobs and engage in astonishing double-dipping.
However, there is more to this than meets the eye. The CIO report said Mdzungairi’s situation at the AMH had become untenable at the end of last year; so he was living on borrowed time. It said it was only a matter of time before he was booted out of the media house where he had been working for 12 years, while doing some other secret things for personal financial benefit.
Given the size and influence of the AMH on the Zimbabwean media landscape and Mdzungairi’s position, as well as the role of the CIO and Mnangagwa’s spokesman George Charamba’s catalyst trigger, the issue inevitably snowballed into a massive scandal.
In other countries where media is central to public life and debate in society, it would have raised a storm.
AMH publishes some of the country’s key newspaper titles, NewsDay, Zimbabwe Independent, The Standard and online radio and television platform, Heart & Soul.
So public interest in the story is indisputable.
Source| NewsHawks
