By Jonathan Mbiriyamveka
HARARE — The most persistent complaint in Zimbabwe’s gospel industry is that there is no money. Minister Everton Mlalazi has a different diagnosis: there is money, but nothing for it to attach to.
Speaking at a free Music & Ministry Seminar themed “The Business Side of Gospel Music,” the award-winning artist and keynote speaker told an audience at ZimParks HQ that sponsorship follows evidence — and most artists are approaching funders with nothing but intention.
“A sponsor joins a vision that is already there,” Minister Mlalazi said.
The statement is deceptively simple. It reframes the industry’s funding problem as a documentation problem, and it places responsibility on artists rather than on corporates.
The conditionality of support
Minister Mlalazi did not merely theorise. He made a specific, public offer.
“If you come to my office and you show me pictures, and clips and whatever, of what you’ve been doing over the years, I can surely direct you — maybe they may be interested in what you are talking about,” he said.
The offer is conditional on three things: evidence, duration and consistency. An artist needs photographs. Clips. A record of activity stretching over years, not months.
What Minister Mlalazi is describing is due diligence. A sponsor considering gospel investment wants to know what they are attaching their name to — how many events, how many people, how long the artist has been doing this, whether the audience turns up repeatedly.
Most artists, he implied, cannot answer those questions.
The venue trap
Mlalazi traced the funding problem to a prior decision: where artists choose to perform.
“What we have now done is that we have now become people who want to go into the big stage, because that’s where the lights are, but the people are also there in Kambuzuma,” he said.
He praised Radiance Acapella for staging a concert in Kambuzuma rather than a city-centre venue — not as a concession to limited resources, but as a strategic choice about where the audience actually is.
The argument has commercial logic. A flagship venue in central Harare carries high costs, one-off marketing and a single-night audience. A recurring community show carries lower overheads, repeat attendance and — crucially — a visible pattern that a sponsor can evaluate.
“Imagine if you are doing something in Glenora, every year, you are doing this show that you are doing,” Minister Mlalazi said.
“Imagine if you are doing this thing every year — trust me, in the third, fourth year, you will have people saying, we want to support you.”
The third-year tipping point
The three-to-four-year timeline is the most concrete element of Mlalazi’s argument, and it is deliberately unglamorous.
It means the first year produces a show. The second year produces a repeat. The third year produces a pattern. By the fourth, the artist has something a funder can recognise: a proven event with a returning audience and a documented history.
“It’s not going to happen,” Minister Mlalazi said of artists attempting to skip that process. “It’s not going to happen, because you are deciding to hit above your own weight.”
The phrase describes a mismatch between ambition and foundation — and it is offered as an explanation, not an insult.
The David precedent
To illustrate the point, Minister Mlalazi drew on the biblical account of David, anointed as king but sent back to tend cattle.
“David understood that whilst he had been anointed for kingship, he still had to… Do you know that even after he was anointed for kingship, he went back to herd cattle?” he said.
For gospel artists, the analogy carries a specific weight. Anointing — the spiritual validation of a calling — is not the same as readiness. The gap between the two is closed by work, and the work takes years.
He extended the logic to comparisons with established figures.
“Pastor G. has many years in ministry. How can I want to be like him already yesterday? It’s impossible,” he said. “I can’t be Minister Mahendere over 30 years. I would throw a tea jar at you.”
What the seminar was addressing
Mlalazi’s keynote sat within a broader programme addressing the practical economics of gospel work. The panel — including National Arts Council of Zimbabwe CEO Napoleon Nyanhi, ZIMURA board chairman Alexio Gwenzi, gospel artist Minister Michael Mahendere, Earground’s Plot Mhako and Power FM station manager Leander “Leekay” Kandiero, moderated by Yvonne Tivatye — covered royalties, rights and getting paid; branding without losing the message; airplay, streaming and digital income; and contracts, bookings and running a ministry like a business.
Monister Mlalazi’s contribution addressed the precondition for all of it. Royalties assume recordings that generate income. Branding assumes a brand that exists. Contracts assume a party worth contracting. Bookings assume an audience.
The uncomfortable implication
If Minister Mlalazi is right that sponsors join visions already in place, then the industry’s funding deficit is not primarily a corporate failure. It is a documentation and consistency deficit among artists.
That conclusion is uncomfortable because it places the burden on the people with the least resources. It is easier to build a three-year record of annual community concerts when you have some capital behind you than when you do not.
But Mlalazi’s offer to connect artists with potential sponsors — conditional on evidence — suggests he sees the missing ingredient as discipline rather than money. The vision must come first. The sponsor comes after.
“A sponsor joins a vision that is already there,” he said.
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