By Gabriel Manyati
When Fungisai Zvakavapano-Mashavave recently raised her voice about performers not merely covering her tracks but allegedly cloning her entire artistic footprint, she inadvertently ripped the lid off a pressure cooker that has been hissing in the Zimbabwean music industry for years.
Her complaint was never a standard copyright squabble about a stray chord or a borrowed line. Instead, it struck at a far more unsettling grey area: where does legitimate homage end and the commercial hijacking of an artist’s hard-won identity begin?
Zvakavapano-Mashavave argued that performers were not just singing her songs, but deliberately mimicking her image, her dress sense, her distinctive dance moves and her personal mannerisms, monetising a persona built over decades without her consent.
This friction quickly spilled from social media timelines into the physical world when Dino Mudondo confronted a similar crisis at a wedding booking. Mudondo reportedly arrived to perform at a paying gig only to discover that The Travellers Band, another booked act, had already rinsed his signature repertoire, rattling through crowd-pleasers like Chirangano, Makoikoi and Jatropha before the original architect of those very songs had even stepped up to the microphone. Imagine spending 20 years writing, recording, financing and marketing a catalogue, building an audience brick by brick, only to find that another act has already warmed up the room and cashed in on your professional identity.
Mudondo’s experience distills the absurdity of the current moment. An artist can arrive at their own paying engagement and find themselves commercially outpaced by someone else performing the catalogue that forms their very livelihood. This is not wounded artistic vanity. It is an economic emergency.
The Commercial Asymmetry Of The Live Circuit
To understand why this is happening, one must look closely at the mechanics of the cover band business model. A cover band possesses a formidable commercial advantage. It bypasses the punishingly expensive, multi-year grind of writing, studio recording, video production and trial-and-error marketing. Instead, it inherits a ready-made, pre-validated market of nostalgic listeners and corporate clients who want guaranteed entertainment for weddings, gala dinners and corporate functions.
Clive Mono Mukundu, speaking for In Total Band, has defended his group’s operations by pointing out that they hold a Zimbabwe Music Rights Association licence and operate within the existing legal framework. Mukundu’s defense is entirely rational. Cover bands are a global fixture, and they perform a vital cultural service by keeping older, beloved catalogues alive for younger audiences who might otherwise never encounter them.
Yet this creates a profound economic asymmetry. When a successful cover band functions as a slick live-entertainment enterprise built on the accumulated intellectual property of dozens of original creators, a dangerous inversion takes place. The original creator risks becoming commercially less competitive than the people reproducing their work. Original artists bear the crushing costs of creation, from studio fees and session musicians to endless promotion, while cover bands harvest the fruit of that labour in the live performance market.
At the eye of this storm sits the Zimbabwe Music Rights Association, ZIMURA, wrestling with an increasingly toxic licensing crisis. ZIMURA insists that commercial public performances require proper authorisation and that cover bands must acquire licences, maintaining that artists possess an absolute right to benefit financially from their catalogues.
Against this, cover band representatives point to their paid licences as proof of lawful operation, even as bitter disputes flare up around pricing models like the contested US$150 cover band tariff and subsequent regulatory pushback. Because allegations fly thick and fast between musicians, collecting societies and commercial acts, it is vital to separate verified institutional positions from raw grievance. What ZIMURA officials claim, what musicians allege on radio and parliament floor, and what cover-band representatives maintain in their defense remain locked in a web of conflicting narratives and unresolved disputes.
The Opaque Pipeline Of Collective Management
Underpinning these turf wars is the foundational question of royalties, which remains the beating heart of the musicians’ grievances. Obtaining a licence is one thing, but ensuring that the songwriter actually receives meaningful financial returns when their work is commercially exploited is entirely another. Artists have long complained of receiving meagre, opaque annual royalty payouts that bear no resemblance to the frequency with which their songs are blasted at public venues and corporate functions.
When a composer hears their life’s work performed before hundreds of paying patrons while receiving a pittance from the commercial ecosystem surrounding it, institutional trust inevitably collapses. This opaque financial pipeline has fuelled public demands from musicians for independent forensic audits, clear accounts and complete institutional transparency.
The crisis has also exposed dangerous fault lines in collective management governance, drawing in rival entities like the Zimbabwe Collective Copyright Corporation, ZICCO, and prompting fierce parliamentary inquiries. Musicians are publicly demanding to know how royalties are tracked, who collects the money, and why the institutions designed to protect them appear so detached from their daily economic survival. When artists publicly interrogate the very bodies meant to guard their intellectual property, the social contract of collective management is severely ruptured.
This simmering frustration has finally forced its way into the halls of parliament, transforming what was once mere industry gossip into a matter of national legislative reform. Lawmakers are now being dragged into answering structural questions that have been ignored for decades. Who should license cover bands, and what should those tariffs actually cost? How quickly do collected royalties reach the rightful composers? How can creators effectively audit collecting societies that operate behind closed doors?
Furthermore, parliament must confront the deeply emotional and financial plight of widows and estates of deceased music legends, such as the late Leonard Dembo, whose timeless catalogues continue to fuel profitable tribute shows while their surviving families struggle to capture sustainable intergenerational wealth.
Navigating The Grey Area Between Homage And Replication
Legal experts like intellectual property lawyer Moses Nkomo have repeatedly pointed out that Zimbabwe’s legal framework suffers from a glaring regulatory void. The law does not clearly establish where legitimate musical inspiration ends and commercial replication begins. A song is one thing, a musical composition is another, and a live performance is entirely different again. But when a band crosses the line from playing a cover version to deliberately cloning an artist’s choreography, costume choices, vocal inflections and stage persona, the current legal framework falls frustratingly short. An artist cannot claim ownership over a generic musical genre or a broad cultural aesthetic simply because they popularised it, but neither should the law remain blind to deliberate commercial mimicry that cannibalises an artist’s brand.
Yet, any serious analysis of this landscape must avoid falling into lazy moral binaries. Original artists are not always infallible saints of intellectual property. Some legitimate complaints about piracy and identity theft occasionally mask a deeper discomfort with healthy competition, shifting audience tastes, or the bitter pill of watching a younger, hungier band draw bigger crowds with older songs. Conversely, cover bands are not innocent cultural missionaries operating purely out of a love for heritage. If a band extracts substantial commercial profit from another artist’s intellectual property, a robust, transparent mechanism must exist to ensure the creators are justly compensated.
Saying that everyone has always done it, or pointing to a disputed licence, does not magically erase the economic reality of uncompensated appropriation.
If Zimbabwean music is genuinely recognised as intellectual property, the nation must answer a blunt, inescapable question. Why have we built an industry in which the people who created that property struggle to control, monetise and even account for the value generated from it? How do we protect the economic rights of original musicians without crushing the cover-band industry that provides vital employment, live entertainment and cultural preservation?
Building A Modern Framework For Musical Assets
The solution does not lie in banning cover bands or retreating into defensive isolationism. It demands a thorough, modern regulatory overhaul. Zimbabwe needs a clear statutory definition of a cover band, a transparent national licensing regime with publicly accessible tariffs, and digital tracking mechanisms for songs performed at commercial events. Collecting societies must be subjected to regular, independent financial audits, with published annual royalty distribution reports that clearly separate administrative costs from artists’ dues.
Furthermore, the law must establish a precise legal dividing line between a standard musical cover and predatory commercial impersonation, backed by an accessible complaints and appeals tribunal for creators and artists’ estates.
Zimbabwe should never be forced to choose between honouring the creators of its music and keeping that musical heritage alive on live stages. But the real scandal is watching both sides tear each other apart while the institutions responsible for turning art into a functioning economic asset remain outdated, opaque, and incapable of answering the most basic question of all. When Zimbabwean music makes money, where does the money actually go?
