Continued from yesterday…

Talking about conditions of service, we don’t understand why Mr Thabo Kawana needs to preoccupy himself with journalists salaries. If he has read his job description, this doesn’t fall under his mandate. In Zambia, issues of conditions of service in the public and private sector are administered under the Ministry of Labour and Social Security. There is a department of Labour that has three separate units; namely the Industrial Relations unit, Labour Inspection unit and Employment unit. These are the people mandated to set and enforce minimum wages and all issues pertaining to conditions of service. The Labour Inspection unit has the power to visit companies and check if employees are paid acceptable wages. So, in that regard, media houses are not answerable to Mr Kawana, and we don’t understand why he would be snooping around to pick romours about how much our journalists are being paid.

In fact, the information Mr Kawana is looking for is already at the Ministry of Labour. If he cared to ask them, they would have told him that they already conducted an investigation at News Diggers. When the labour inspectors came, they demanded to see our payroll, workers’ contracts and employment manual. They asked to see our reporting mechanism in terms of grievances. The inspectors went further to interview our employees away from us and asked them everything they wanted to know. All we can say is that we were given good feedback and so, therefore, whatever Mr Kawana is looking for at News Diggers, he won’t find it.

Business is very hard in the media sector. This government has not been very supportive of private media houses as they promised during campaigns. The imaginary profits that Mr Kawana claims is making media owners fat is not there. But we still make ends meet and continue to keep Mr Kawana and his government in check without flouting labour laws. We may not pay our hardworking journalists enough money as they deserve, but whatever little we make, we share, and as we grow in the years, their take home salary continues to increase gradually. Since we started News Diggers, there has never been a month where our employees have not been paid. In fact, we have never crossed into another month before paying our fellow workers. Even if the media owners (who are also employees here) don’t get paid, we make sure that the rest of our staff is considered on time.

If Mr Kawana has information about a media house that has gone over eight months without paying salaries, that is a clear case for the Labour Department and he must report the matter. He must not waste time snooping around News Diggers because here we are driven by passion, not money. If all we wanted was money, we would have sold this company to the highest bidder and walked away quietly instead of fighting with politicians. Many people have approached us, offering us what one would consider irresistible money. Relatives of ministers in this same UPND government have come to entice us to sell them shares in this company so that we can stop suffering; but we have refused and turned away those offers. We have said we want to remain an independent watchdog for our country on behalf of the people.

We have given an example before of how News Diggers was formed. The founders of News Diggers used to be just employees of a company called Post Newspapers Limited. When the government of Edgar Lungu shut down the newspaper in June 2016 and later had it liquidated, these Post employees had nowhere to go. A new newspaper was established under the same Post umbrella, but they decided to walk away and chart their own path. They had no money and no connections, but they were very passionate about news reporting and could speak journalism fluently. So, they decided to create a website and start reporting news for free on the Internet. They decided to do so without hiding the identity of the people producing the content, as was the trend at the time. From 2016 when News Diggers started operating up to 2020, these former Post employees and a few others who came on board had been giving free online news to the public. During that period, the employees turned into employers as the new members of the team needed contracts and salaries. With nowhere to get money to pay new employees, a decision was made to introduce a website paywall, hoping our dedicated, faithful readers would bail us out. True to our wish and ambition, our readers came to our aid and they have never let us down since then.

Our point is that at News Diggers, we created employment for ourselves and other Zambians who are of like mind. Under a very difficult economy, we have tried to survive on a shoestring budget to keep our dream going. We are not driven by getting fat, our mission is to keep our elected leaders in check and remind them when they grow big headed. So Mr Kawana should stop embarrassing media owners. If he has concerns about the media, let him follow the right procedure. He may be a political cadre, but as long as he is serving in that dignified office, he needs to try, or even pretend to be dignified.