Hopewell Chin’ono

It is a serious misconception that journalists are supposed to be neutral. Journalists do not need to be neutral. They need to be truthful.

How can I be neutral when one side is stealing public funds? How am I supposed to be neutral when I see poor people being driven off their land to make way for corrupt businesspeople?

How am I supposed to stay neutral when I can see that something about to happen will cause real harm to ordinary people? Neutrality between the thief and the victim is not journalism. It is cowardice dressed up as professionalism.

Not once were we taught neutrality in journalism classes. We were taught truthfulness. We were taught honesty.
We were taught accuracy and fairness, which means getting the facts right and giving people the right to reply, not pretending that a lie and the truth carry equal weight.

The great Christiane Amanpour put it simply when she said journalists must be truthful, not neutral. Archbishop Desmond Tutu went further, warning that if you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.

So no, journalists don’t need to be neutral. They should be accurate, they should be fair, and they should tell the truth, even when the truth makes powerful people uncomfortable.

When people do that, it means they have nothing productive to show the world. That is the only reason anyone needs a photoshoot for a phone.

Real CEOs do not behave like that. They show you what their companies make. Look at Elon Musk. Every day he is showing us the cars Tesla is building, the satellites SpaceX is launching for Starlink and the rockets that land themselves back on Earth. That is a genuine CEO. You might not like him, and I do not like the guy, but there is a lot we can learn from people like him.

Nobody talks about Elon Musk's new trousers. Nobody knows what watch he wears. It is beneath him. When people produce something, you marvel at the product, not the man's wardrobe.

So when you see a so-called CEO showing you his phone, his trousers and his watch, that is poverty mentality. That is nouveau riche. Those are people who want to be seen because they have nothing to show for themselves. If your company's best product is your outfit, you are not running a company, you are running a fashion parade.

That same poverty mentality runs through our politicians. You see them arriving in Rolls-Royces on potholed roads, desperate to be seen with something expensive, as if a car can wash away a background that is embarrassing and shameful.

You see them stepping out in Louis Vuitton shoes to visit communities that have no clean drinking water. The shoes cost more than the borehole those communities have been begging for.

Real billionaire businessmen like Strive Masiyiwa have sent thousands of young people to universities across the world. That is what they are known for. Nobody knows them for Louis Vuitton or for the cars they drive.

They have moved far beyond the need for that kind of attention, and in truth, they never needed it in the first place. Their mission in life was never about being seen. It was about something much bigger than themselves.

Poor people obsess over what they wear. They deal with their insecurities by hiding behind labels. Wealthy people worry about the legacy they will leave behind, not about wearing what Jamaicans call "name brands." That is stuff for poor people!

What is the point of wearing expensive clothes when you do not own your home, your car is on finance, you have zero savings, and if you die today, you leave nothing for your children? There is a name for that, it is called STUPIDITY!

A designer shirt loses its value the moment you walk out of the shop. A title deed, a business or a savings account can feed your family for generations. Dress for the life you are building, not for the people you are trying to impress.

COMING SOON…

What does the inevitable demise of the African National Congress (ANC) mean for Zimbabwe and for its ally and sister party, ZANUPF?

History has a lesson for us. When apartheid South Africa found itself fighting for its own survival, it dropped Ian Smith and Rhodesia like a hot potato.

Under John Vorster, and later P.W. Botha, Pretoria put its own interests first and pulled the rug from under the very regime it had propped up for years.

When the ANC is forced to fight for its own survival or when it eventually becomes a spend force, will ZANUPF suffer the same fate as a result, or will it once again draw on one of its nine lives?

What will become of ZANUPF and its relationship with South Africa if opposition political parties opposed to its politics in Zimbabwe take over government in Pretoria? Is ZANUPF preparing for that possibility, or is it business as usual?

You clearly do not understand your own history, my dear brother.

For decades, farms and mines recruited workers from Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi because they were cheap to employ. Some of South Africa's greatest icons came from that history. Ray Phiri was raised by Justnow Kanyama Phiri, who left Dedza in Malawi in 1937 to work in the South African mines.

Hugh Masekela traced his roots to Great Zimbabwe in Masvingo, where his great grandfather's people came from, with the original surname Munyepawu.

As former apartheid Prime Minister John Vorster says in the video attached below, this business of illegal immigration started long before you were born, and long before your parents were born.

The South African state knew exactly what was happening, and it allowed it to happen. It understood that to build the country it wanted, it needed cheap labour.

Saying this does not mean one supports illegal immigration. It means one is educated enough to understand the structural pillars that were put in place to build the South Africa we see today.

So do not come here and claim that illegal immigration started in 1994. How can it have started in 1994 when the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association (WNLA), popularly known as Wenela, was set up by the mining houses in 1901 to recruit cheap labour from across the region? That is more than 120 years ago.

Cheap labour is not created by the worker. It is created by the employer who chooses to underpay and by a state that fails to enforce the minimum wage. Blame the farmer who exploits and the inspector who looks away, not the poor worker trying to survive.

History matters. Read it before you rewrite it.