Surely ZBC Had The Capacity To Broadcast The Presidential Challenge Court Case, Kudos To It For Good Broadcasting

Kudos to ZBC for the good broadcast of the Constitutional Court proceedings. . Many (including me) doubted that ZBC will prove worthy of the charge to give us a good broadcasting of the court case, but it did. The state-owned broadcaster is notorious for just unceremoniously blacking out or glitching but in the two days of broadcasting the court proceedings, we didn’t see any of that. No wonder why the court ruled that you had enough capacity to give us a good broadcast.

It was the first time any recording or broadcasting of proceedings in a court case has happened in Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe’s courts usually ban journalists from recording proceedings other than with notebooks and pens.

Furthermore, many people have no direct contact with the justice system and they depend on media for news related to courts. But this broadcast helped in eliminating this gap and improved our layman’s understanding of courts beyond news reports and judgments.

Should court cases be broacasted in the future?

I’m not sure if the point of allowing the case to be broadcast was to play to the hype surrounding the case or to give effect to transparency. However, I feel that broadcasting of courts may enhance the transparency and integrity of our judicial system hence it would be good to keep on broadcasting court cases.

Anyway, I hope that this court case is a “baby step” which could lead to a wider filming of the courts in the future.