ZBC suspends chief executive Chikunguru

Harare- ZIMBABWE Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC) has on Wednesday suspended the Corporation’s Chief Executive Officer, Adelaide Chikunguru with immediate effect,Express Mail Zim can report.

This was revealed in a statement released by the board of directors.

Reasons for her suspension were not made public.

“The reasons for Chikunguru’s suspension have been confidentially made known to her but are not, however, being made public for the time being,” read part of the statement.

The finance director Assael Machakata has been appointed as the acting chief executive.

Although the ZBC board remained mum on the reason of suspension, insiders said she was unpopular with employees for allegedly running the corporation with an ‘iron fist’.

In June last year, Chikunguru pulled a shocker and stormed out of a meeting with employees who were against a new job grading system that she had introduced.

” One of the issues for her suspension was growing unpopularity with employees after she introduced the Paterson Job Evaluating System which essentially places job decision-making into six groups or bands which are policy-making, programming, interpretive, routine, automatic and defined,” said an insider.

She allegedly fumed at employees declaring that she was in total control and was not to be challenged.

The system she introduced is used to rank jobs by grade and be the root of a fair and impartial salary structure. It’s implemented by sorting jobs into the aforementioned six groups that are then further stratified according to factors like stress factors, individual tolerance, length of job and number of job responsibilities that correspond to organisational levels to eventually give an organisation pay/salary scales.

Recently , there was an outcry that ZBC paid legal fees that were more than the money they wanted to recover from two employees who were later acquitted at the courts.

This raised a stink with speculative reports suggesting that Chikunguru had a’ business relationship’ with the hired law firm and was a beneficiary.