Leaner ZBC on the cards: Charamba | The Herald

via Leaner ZBC on the cards: Charamba | The Herald January 16, 2014 by Zvamaida Murwira

GOVERNMENT will soon wield the axe on managers and staff at the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation to create a lean, effective and efficient team, legislators heard yesterday.Secretary for Information, Media and Broadcasting Services Mr George Charamba said preliminary investigations showed the 47 managers gobbled about 33 percent of the salary bill.

Giving oral evidence before the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Information, Media and Broadcasting Services, Mr Charamba said US$4,6 million recently went to pay employee salaries that had been outstanding for seven months.

“We have put everyone (management) top or low, full size or half size on a flat allowance,” said Mr Charamba.
He said it had emerged that some managers had given themselves salary advances on the basis of their current huge perks in anticipation of the cuts that are coming.

Mr Charamba said the ministry had become aware that the now suspended chief executive, Mr Happison Muchechetere, was not fully qualified for the job and was drawing a huge salary, but could not act as swiftly as it would have desired because of bickering involving ZBC by partners in the inclusive Government ahead of last year’s referendum and harmonised elections.

“There is a damning report that I wrote to the former minister (Webster Shamu) which I fell short of saying ‘we just have to dismantle the whole management’ because clearly, what I had seen was that the incumbent did not have the qualities to be where he was,” he said. “It was so clear to me that here was an editor who was now running an institution as an administrator. He was ill-equipped for it.”

Mr Charamba said Mr Muchechetere had either arbitrarily awarded perks to himself and his team, or had done it with the concurrence of one board member as there was no evidence of a board resolution to effect the packages.