24-hour tv news channel initiative

The state broadcasters of Namibia and Zimbabwe are planning to establish a 24-hour satellite news channel, according to Zimbabwe's official newspaper, The Herald. The television station, to be based at the Namibian port of Walvis Bay, will be co-owned by Zimbabwe Broadcasting Holdings (ZBH) and Namibia Broadcasting Corporation (NBC), the newspaper reported last week. "ZBH has appointed its editor-in-chief for news, Chris Chivinge, to head the new Africa World Satellite News Channel," said The Herald. The NBC declined to comment on the issue. "We will announce the matter in due course," a public relations official told IRIN. The news channel was supposed to have started broadcasting on 1 November, noted the independent daily newspaper, The Namibian, and quoted NBC director general Gerry Munyama as saying in September that the project depended on a feasibility report. "We are waiting for the report from the technical committee - only after that will we proceed," Munyama told the newspaper. But the Namibia-based Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) has questioned the use of public funds for the proposed 24-hour news channel, suggesting that the money would be better spent on community broadcast stations. "So far, no-one is willing to divulge any information about this new television channel," Zoe Titus, regional manager for media monitoring at MISA, told IRIN. "The proposed television channel might follow a particular party line while reporting - the NBC does not report anything negative about Zimbabwe and vice versa." Namibian and Zimbabwean print media houses have already established a weekly regional newspaper, The Southern Times, which was launched in September. The weekly's editorial office is in a new multimillion-dollar complex built by the Namibian state paper, New Era. The Southern Times is headed by The Herald's assistant editor, Moses Magadza, printed in Zimbabwe and distributed in several countries of the Southern African Development Community. According to a joint statement by the publishers, they anticipate a readership of 340 million people for the Sunday paper. "For many years the African story has been told to the world by those who, only yesterday, sought to undermine and plunder the continent, and despised everything that was Africa," Herbert Nkala, chairman of Zimbabwe's state publisher, Zimpapers, said at the launch ceremony. "Colonial media institutions can never be, and should never be, relied upon to report factually about Africa; reading about Africa in the Western media, one only reads about scorched earth, hopelessness, despair, hunger and disease," said Nkala.