THE ROLE OF THE MEDIA IN PETS

Dodoma Hotel, June 2010.

By Elias Mhegera

One of the major roles of the media is to make leaders accountable to their subjects. For that matter, media accountability is part and parcel of the process of transparency and good governance.

Media outlets can facilitate in the Public Expenditure Tracking Survey (PETS) exercise by conducting research, investigation, follow ups, and reports as well as verify the monitoring and evaluation processes.

But this then requires special skills, it requires investigative journalism skills. De Burgh (2000) states that: "An investigative journalist is a man or woman whose profession it is to discover the truth and to identify lapses from it in whatever media may be available.

The act of doing this generally is called investigative journalism and is distinct from apparently similar work done by police, lawyers, auditors and regulatory bodies in that it is not limited as to target, not legally founded and closely connected to publicity.


Members of the community must be enlightened in order to understand that PETS is for their own benefit. They should know that the process is meant to track the flow of public funds and material resources from the central government level that was meant for their utilization.


Thus the sense of ownership is an essential component that must be imparted to the communities in order to induce action. People must feel that the aim is to improve the quality of service delivery at the local level.

They must be prepared by the media whose task is to teach, that public funds and material resources must end up where they are supposed to. If they don’t, people must ask, why and where are those funds being diverted to.


In this case investigative journalists should be involved in unveiling crime, political corruption, or corporate wrongdoing. An investigative journalist may spend from few weeks to months or years in researching and preparing a report.

Most investigative journalism is done by newspapers, wire services and freelance journalists. Practitioners sometimes use the terms "watchdog journalism" or "accountability reporting."

As part of an investigation, journalists make use of:

Analysis of documents, such lawsuits and other legal documents, tax records, government reports, regulatory reports and corporate financial filings. It deals with investigation of technical issues including scrutiny of equipment and its performance.

Research into social and legal issues, record sources as well as, in some instances, interviews with anonymous sources (for example whistleblowers), and analyzing documents and data from government agencies.

In the case of local governments journalists both from the electronic and print media should in the first place, understand core issues in regard to politics, corruption and influencing factors which determines who wins what and when.
Apart from knowing issues, investigative journalism and public journalism in general must build communities. These are supposed to support an agenda which has been set by the media.

For instance in the Richmond scandal, the media had reported persistently that there were discrepancies in the contract, the general public was put in full alert, the Parliament formed a committee under Kyela MP, Dr Harrison Mwakyembe.

Eventually the Parliamentary Probe Committee came up with a report which led to the resignation of Mr Edward Lowassa, then prime minister and other prominent figures.

Another example is the “takrima law”. In this case the media had reported persistently, the general public was alerted, there was a general outcry against that infamous law.

Eventually the civil society through three legal NGOs namely; LEAT, LHRC, and NOLA took the matter to the court, eventually the law was struck off and takrima was condemned.

This then tells that the media can not work alone if the expected outcomes are a tangible action from the authorities, there must be a community to pursue the matter further.

That is why the media is also known as the Fourth Estate, as it works independently to check the powers of the other three estates namely; the Executive, Judiciary and Legislature.


In the local government perspective the communities that are supposed to work hand in hand with the media are; the auditors, stock verifiers, and the community in general.

Investigative journalists must understand that the political game is always characterized by conflicts, so they must know how best they take advantage of those conflicts.

They must be able to get reports and executive summaries as their starting points. They should manipulate and get genuine expenditures for example if an accounting officer is ready to give periodic check of store account balances.

In this instance they must be able to access reports of stock verifiers. However, if the services of stock verifiers are not available, investigative journalists will have to double check and verify various reports.

These are from the Ministry of Finance, or from other appointed Boards of Survey.


Lastly is there must be a series of networking which can sense any discrepancy and report to the media. The networks should learn from a variety set of experiences. For example who are the resistors of providing information and why are they doing that.

The networks must behave like an electricity circuit that it goes directly in series or parallel with each other. The networks must be wary of the crux of the problem if it exists.

They should identifying sets of resistors that were directly involved and then single out the most resisters.
It should be clear that amongst three resistors, one is likely to reduce a combination.

As the cardinal rule goes, you should identify the weakest links in the chain in order to penetrate in an organization.

The next stage is to conduct coverage serially, and with saturation in order to increase the media impact. Media saturation is a situation whereby a number of media outlets cover the same issue persistently in order to attract action from the authorities.

Media saturation should go hand in hand with inviting opinions from influential personalities. With that type of coverage definitely there would be increased accountability in public expenditures in the local governments.