By Enock Sithole
Journalism training in Zambia has been growing in leaps and bounds but the industry appears to be unable to employ and retain graduates due to the poor working conditions it offers.
According to Dr Basil Hamusokwe, head of the Department of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Zambia, media companies tend to pay low wages which leaves journalism graduates with no choice but to find other careers in government, NGOs and the private sector outside the media industry.
Media entities, he added, end up employing journalists with no qualifications to avoid employing graduates who would expect competitive salaries. This, he said, had negative implications for the quality of journalism in the country.
Journalism education in the country dates back to 1984 under the Department of Mass Communication. In later years, the department added public relations, advertising and film studies to its offering.
Other public and private institutions have since been established, offering various courses related to journalism and awarding diplomas, especially after the “liberalisation” of politics and the economy in 1991.
At the University of Zambia, the training is tailored to the needs of the industry, said Dr Hamusokwe, adding that they constantly follow developments in the industry to be able to produce graduates that are ready for the newsroom.
The department runs a student newspaper and radio station to help students acquire practical skills. Thus, in the first year of their four-year degree, students learn theoretical aspects of journalism before going into doing practical journalism in the newspaper and the radio station.
In the second year, they begin working as reporters and are taught basic reporting skills. In the third year, they learn to be editors and producers, learning how to manage the various aspects of news publishing and radio production. This ensures that when they graduate, they are ready for the newsroom with both theoretical and practical skills, said Dr Hamusokwe.
Dr Hamusokwe concedes that concerns have been expressed that journalism graduates are often not ready for the newsroom, but he insists that this is a scapegoat for the industry’s failure to retain journalism graduates because of poor working conditions.
“There have been concerns like that. What I have observed is that most of the graduates that come from our universities would go into the newsroom, maybe for their first job and spend a year or two. Then they will leave the newsroom for other, better paying jobs in NGOs, international organizations, the corporate world, as communication officers or PR (public relations) people, or even just working in advocacy and mobilization kind of jobs with UN agencies and the like. The reason they do not stay for a long time in the newsrooms is that the conditions of service in the newsrooms are not very motivating,” he said.
“The salaries paid in newsrooms are most suitable to certificate holders or people with no qualifications, whatsoever, he added. They haven’t really been motivating for degree holders because, you see, somebody would graduate with a degree in say mass communication, media, or journalism and go into the newsroom. They will be getting let’s say an equivalent of say USD 160 a month, while their counterparts who would have graduated from other programmes such as economics or social work, even lawyers, would find jobs with salaries starting at about USD 800. In the public sector, they could start at over USD 530,” said Dr Hamusokwe.
Media owners, charged Dr Hamusokwe, create the narrative that journalism graduates don’t stay in the profession to scapegoat their inability to retain them.
In spite of the fact that the industry is unable to retain journalism graduates, journalism training in Zambia remains popular among young people, attracting more than the universities can accommodate.
Of course, some enroll to study journalism purely from seeing journalists glamouring on TV and other media but find a different reality during their studies or later when they get into the profession. This could be another reason why journalism graduates do not stay in the profession.
Journalism training is only offered in English in Zambia even though some journalists work with indigenous languages. Dr Hamusokwe said this had not presented much of a problem to the profession since the Zambia National Broadcasting Corporation (ZNBC), which runs most of the services in indigenous languages, had introduced a system where they trained their own staff to work in indigenous languages.
The ZNBC would recruit people with competence in indigenous languages but with no journalism training. They would capacitate them in journalism through in-house training or by sending them to learning institutions such as the University of Zambia.
This system seems to be working well and there appears to be no urgent need to introduce journalism courses in indigenous languages.