Peta Thornycroft and Peter Fabricius
Foreign Service
HARARE: Insiders at Alpha Media Holdings, Mail and Guardian publisher Trevor Ncube’s Zimbabwe newspaper company, say senior staff in the company’s papers have not been paid their June salaries. But younger members were paid as usual last month.
Those still unpaid are “reasonably confident” they will be paid “soon”, but are not confident the company will ultimately survive the economic crisis gripping Zimbabwe, especially Bulawayo.
Ncube has just announced he will shut down one of his Bulawayo titles, Sunday Southern Eye, which is part of Alpha Media Holdings, and incorporate it into another of his Sunday titles, The Standard.
However, he strongly denied yesterday that the paper was closing, insisting that the reasons for incorporating the Sunday edition into The Standard were “structural”. The company had decided on a change of strategy, he said. Instead of publishing it from Monday to Friday and on Sunday, as at present, the Sunday edition would be incorporated into The Standard. The Monday to Friday editions would continue.
“There will be no staff changes or anything of that sort,” he said. He also denied any senior staff of AMH had not been paid in June. “Do you have evidence?” he asked.
Some staff of AMH said the Bulawayo operation had drained Alpha Media Holdings’ overall resources for the past year. They said the paper had largely been dragged down by the general economic recession in Bulawayo, which is worse than that of the Zimbabwe economy overall.
About 80 percent of Bulawayo’s industries have gone broke over the past few years.
“Bulawayo is a ghost town; it has almost no industry left, and although the newspaper was popular, and had good reports, it has little advertising because the city’s economy doesn’t exist any more,” said a well-placed source in the publishing industry.
Another media insider said that of the 13 registered advertising agencies in Zimbabwe at present more than half were in financial trouble.
Alpha Media Holdings has been retrenching since last year, and still feels the gap left by group chief executive Raphael Khumalo who left the company recently.