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By Farai Matebvu
Journalists need to be adequately capacitated for them to work efficiently; if the scourge of corruption can be overcome.
This came out at a media training workshop hosted by Transparency International Zimbabwe (TIZ) in Mutare this week advocating for journalists to intensively report on corruption related matters conducted.
Journalists were also urged to commit themselves to truth, pursuit of accuracy, fairness, and objectivity when reporting on corruption in the country.
TIZ’s Research and Advocacy officer for Manicaland Region Samuel Matikiti told Nhau that there was need to capacitate journalists who are purveyors of information as a society without such or the means of enquiring it was akin to tragedy.
He said journalists were trying their best to write about corruption but not enough was being done, thus his organisation was ready to support their work.
“Journalists are doing well in exposing corruption but this is not enough. As an organisation we have resources to capacitate them to expose corrupt characters, make informed choices and independent judgments,” said Matikiti.
Acclaimed journalist Andrew Mambondiani who was part of the workshop said the central purpose of journalism in gendered corruption is to expose and provide citizens with accurate and reliable information they need to function in a free society.
He stated that in a democracy journalist must hold the powerful and the corrupt to account.
“In a complex world where information is no longer a scarce commodity, the role of a journalist has become more important than ever, media has a strong character of making and breaking the behaviour of corrupt individuals.”
“The flow of ideas, the capacity to expose corruption and make informed decisions, the ability to criticize the powerful, all of the assumptions on which political democracy rests, depend largely on strong media and journalists,” said Mambondiani.
Governance expert and scholar Freeman Bhoso added that gendered corruption has increasingly affected women and young people and therefore called on the media to bring this to the fore.
“We know this is not being reported fairly, this is not coming out. Gender reporting has gone berserk because real issues that are affecting women are not in the media,” he said.
Bhoso further urged journalists to take advantage of online media which has tremendous power to break barriers through exposing greed and corrupt characters in our midst.
“A free online media has tremendous power to influence others and that power must expose greed and corrupt characters and of course this must be done with objectivity, credibility, and ethics” he said. Nhau/Indaba
