Blitzkrieg scums society
CORRUPTION is like cancer. If left to spread and flower the scourge blights the images of state institutions, local authorities and the name of our country in the eyes of the global community with detrimental consequences all round.
When you consider the horrendous nature of corruption, as this pen does, you cannot help but shower kudos to the Parliament of Zimbabwe for organising a workshop to capacitate journalists and civil society organisations with the necessary skills to foster accountability for public funds particularly in state institutions as well as in local authorities.
President of the Senate, Cde Edna Madzongwe, called, when addressing the workshop in Bulawayo on Tuesday, for the journalists and members of the civil society to work together in exposing corrupt personnel and with that cleansing the institutions in point of abuses of funds in the institutions in question.
This pen has not ever put a foot in the door of civil society organisations and pushed it to look inside to discover just how clean their intestines and hands are and therefore insular to corruption in order for their members to play a role in weeding out corruption, as urged by Cde Madzongwe.
But as a veteran communicologist, this pen can state with equanimity that, by their very nature and character, journalists are born to play a pivotal role in blitzkrieging corrupt and other evil tendencies hibernating in society while at the same time informing, educating and entertaining that same society.
As such print and broadcast journalists must be driven in their work by an unflinching intrepidity to rake the muck in the society so as to instill fear of the law and of God’s wrath among would-be-corrupt and other potential criminals.
But perhaps the greatest capacity-builder for journalists and for members of civil society feeding them with information about corrupt individuals to expose, is a piece of no-nonsense legislation against flitfingered handlers of cash or those with easy access to funds in local authorities as well as in state institutions.
Thus, while it was all very well for parliament to set up the workshop to empower media practitioners and civil society members for them to effectively fight corruption, for these people to name and shame corrupt public officials will be akin to the title of Shakespeare’s play, Much Ado About Nothing without the backing of a stiff anti-corruption law.
As the legislative arm of the Government, it is incumbent on the legislature to pass such a law to deal corruption a death knell.
Equally important, the journalists themselves will need protection against lawsuits by those they expose soil. as corrupt; otherwise the scribes will risk running the gauntlet of lawsuits for alleged defamation of character by those that they name for fiddling with their employers’ money.
Yet an all out crackdown on corruption is something long, long overdue in this country with executives and others known increasingly to be involved in rat races for riches using illgotten money.
Frequent Press reports about rampant corruption frighten, or even deter potential foreign investors to the detriment of this country’s woundedknee economy that needs an external financial lifeline to revive it from the onslaught of illegal Western sanctions imposed as punishment for the introduction of the land reform programme to correct historical imbalances in the distribution of that vital natural resource, the
is pen also believes that an urgent need exists for the Church to weigh in strongly with a positive outreach campaign against any evil deeds, be they economic, political or social for God the Almighty to intervene and restore lawfulness and order in our society.
Whether humanity realises it or not, likes it or not, the positive outreach of God’s people, the Church, alone stands the only chance of bringing sanity, legality and order to our troubled globe with ravages of violence, corruption and general lawlessness depicting what appear to be signs of end times.