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HARARE - George Charamba, the Media, Information and Broadcasting Services ministry permanent secretary, has said former Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC) chief executive Happison Muchechetere was not qualified for the job.
Charamba told the parliamentary portfolio committee on Media, Information and Communication Technology chaired by William Dewa, that he had personally protested Muchechetere’s suitability for the highly demanding job.
Charamba was responding to questions from the committee which was keen to find out who had approved hefty perks for the ex-ZBC boss and other senior managers at Pockets Hill at a time workers had gone for seven months without salaries.
“The incumbent was not fit to be where he was as he was an editor,” Charamba told the lawmakers.
“I wrote to the former minister Webster Shamu a damming report about him. I fell short of letting him know that he was not qualified. However, there was a lot of shadow boxing on the matter. Because of the inclusive government, it got us to be defensive about the ZBC.”
Muchechetere, who is currently on forced suspension, earned $27 000 plus a range of perks including
$3 000 in allowances for housing, $2 500 allowance, $3 000 for home entertainment, unlimited business entertainment allowance among other perks.
Charamba denied that his ministry had approved Muchechetere’s hefty package.
“There was no reference to the parent ministry and we had no communication from the ZBC board that it had proposed to pay managers hefty salaries,” Charamba said.
“We had no evidence that the board had accepted that salary. We have discovered that these salaries were either awarded arbitrarily by the CEO himself and his junior managers or could have been agreed with one board member.”
Charamba said they have agreed to pay a flat fee to the suspended managers and has also cleared the outstanding salaries owed to workers amounting to $4, 6 million.
He said there were some workers who had not received their money since they had no contracts with ZBC and were not reporting for duty.