Zimbabwe: Election fatigue

Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe
Monday January 26th – Sunday February 1st 2004

Weekly Media Update 2004-4

CONTENTS

1. ELECTION COVERAGE FATIGUE

2. RESTART REKINDLES CONSPIRACIES

3. CREDIBILITY HEIST
4. FOOD SECURITY AND AGRICULTURE

1. Election coverage fatigue

The media’s lack of professional resilience when covering elections was illustrated again by the way in which they handled the Gutu North by-election. The media generally gave scant attention to the election and, as a result, omitted pertinent information on the electoral process, which the ruling party has manipulated in the past to tilt the outcome in its favour.

For example, none the Press investigated the state of the voters’ roll, why the opposition had been refused access to the consolidated roll, or challenged the Registrar General’s office why it had set the election dates during the week when previous polls have been held at weekends. There was no information on the campaign manifestos of the contestants nor on the location of polling stations.

The private media focused largely on ZANU PF’s intimidatory campaign methods. For instance, three of the five reports the private papers carried were on ZANU PF violence or the intimidation of chiefs and MDC activists, including its candidate, Crispa Musoni.

The chiefs were reportedly told they would be stripped of their powers if ZANU PF lost the election.

The rest were on the Zimbabwe Civic Education Trust’s campaigns for peaceful elections and ZANU PF’s abuse of national institutions and developmental projects for campaigning.

The Standard (1/2), for example, quoted Vice President Joseph Msika using the commissioning of an irrigation scheme in Zvavahera Village in Gutu North to campaign. Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority boss Sydney Gata was also quoted at the same occasion telling villagers: “Zesa is Zanu PF. If you see any trucks belonging to Zesa, Arda (Agricultural Rural Development Authority) or DDF (District Development Fund) doing work in the roads, you should know it is Zanu PF doing it.” He further urged directors of ZESA “to learn Zanu PF slogans”.

The Sunday Mail (1/2) reported the event but censored Gata’s remarks. However, it quoted Foreign Affairs Minister Stan Mudenge saying, “the country’s sovereignty was sacrosanct and will never be lost through the ballot box”. The underlying implications of this statement were not scrutinized.

The report was one of the four stories carried by the government Press one of which related to voter education. The other two denied private media reports of ZANU PF violence against perceived opponents.

The trend was similar on ZBC. The broadcaster carried three ZANU PF campaign stories and four voter education reports. These included Msika in Zvavahera where he invaribaly labelled the MDC as “sellouts, sponsored stooges and anti-revolutionaries”.

Like the government Press, ZBC suffocated stories exposing violence against the opposition. ZTV (30/1, 7am) however, confirmed private media reports that ZANU PF was urging chiefs to bar the opposition from holding rallies in their areas. But instead of condeming such undemocratic activities, ZTV’s reporter passively endorsed the practice, saying chiefs did not “want a party which promotes the interests of the British colonisers”.

Private radio stations, which exposed this chicanery the previous week, condemned it as a blatant subversion of the electoral process.

Besides exposing ZANU PF’s violent campaign in Gutu North, the private media also publicized other incidents of rights abuses committed by ZANU PF supporters in other parts of the country. For example, SW Radio Africa (26/1 and 27/01) reported that Zanu-PF youths had beaten up MDC supporters in Chimanimani. A follow-up story appeared in The Daily News on Sunday (1/2).

In fact, SW Radio Africa (26/1) cited a report by the Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum on Zimbabwe’s human rights record, which revealed that over 90 percent of the incidents of political violence reported country-wide were perpetrated by Zanu-PF youths, with the police failing to act.

This seemed to be vindicated by a High Court ruling that awarded MDC activist John Mukondwa $800,000 in damages after he was shot by a policeman in a politically motivated incident before the 2002 presidential election (The Daily News, 28/1). The officer was in the company of ZANU PF youths who beat up and tortured Mukondwa.

2. RESTART rekindles Conspiracies

The launch of the MDC’s economic blueprint dubbed Reconstruction, Stabilisation, Recovery and Transformation (RESTART), which is premised on the assumption that the opposition will be in power at the beginning of July this year, saw the government Press re-engage its usual conspiracy theories.

Without fully reporting the substance of RESTART, the government Press dismissed the plan as a copy of government policies. These newspapers then claimed that the MDC’s assumption that it would be in office by July demonstrated that the party wanted to get into power by illegal means.

Recent statements by MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai that his party would embark on mass action to force President Mugabe to the negotiating table (The Daily News and The Daily Mirror, 26/1) and the US State Department’s warning to US citizens against traveling to Zimbabwe were handily used to lend credence to the claim that the MDC was plotting to oust the government unconstitutionally.

The opposition party’s lobbying of the EU to extend its targeted sanctions against members of the ruling elite – which the government media persistently distort to mean broad-based economic sanctions – was also used to question the MDC’s sincerity in resolving the country’s economic ills.

Although ZBC steered clear of the conspiracy theories peddled by its print counterparts, its token coverage of the MDC’s economic rescue package and selective reporting was equally designed to discredit the plan. As a result, it starved its audiences of what exactly RESTART stood for.

Just before the launch of RESTART, the government-controlled media tried to pre-empt the contents of the MDC’s policy by discrediting the value of the programme (The Herald, 27/1, Power FM and ZTV, 28/01 8pm). In its article, Gono report stings MDC, The Herald claimed the opposition had been plunged into “confusion” and forced to “revise” its economic blueprint because of the effectiveness of the Reserve Bank Governor Gideon Gono’s monetary policy. The article then stated that the MDC document, which it claimed to “have been discussed at the embassy of a Commonwealth member-state in Harare”, was a “carbon copy of Government programmes”.

However, besides trying to draw parallels between some commissions, which the MDC intends to establish and those that are already in place, there was no thorough comparative analysis of RESTART and government policies to substantiate its claim.

Rather, the paper exploited the assumption by the MDC that it would be in power by July 2004 to cobble up a conspiracy, arguing that this was evidence the opposition “was working on a violent and unconstitutional take-over of power” ahead of the 2005 parliamentary and 2008 presidential elections.

To reinforce this, the paper reported: “ The launch of the economic policy comes at a time when Mr Tsvangirai has announced that the party would embark on mass action countrywide”, adding that this statement “coincided with a warning by the Unites States’ State Department encouraging American citizens to leave Zimbabwe alleging ‘political, economic and humanitarian crises which could have a serious impact on security”’.

The paper (28/1) repeated these claims in its comment, MDC in bid to sabotage economy, in which it accused the MDC of “creating problems in order to keep alive its hope of getting into power through the back door”. Its views were echoed by The Sunday Mail comment.

ZBC’s (Power FM and ZTV, 28/01 8pm) political agenda on the issue was similarly exposed when it paraded Walter Mzembi, ZANU PF’s District Coordinating Chairman for Masvingo province, as an “independent analyst”. Mzembi dismissed the MDC document as “cheap electioneering” adding that it was “unnecessary” because the country was already on the road to recovery, as evidenced by falling prices, and the ‘firming’ of the Zimbabwe dollar.

However, Studio 7 (28/1) reported Eliphas Mukonoweshuro, a University of Zimbabwe political lecturer and MDC adviser, disputing Muzembi’s claims noting that “if anything, the economy is going down, down on a daily basis and this can be measured against any index; health, education, levels of unemployment, levels of poverty…”

Likewise, The Daily News (28/1) quoted the MDC’s Tendai Biti dismissing some of the government media’s allegations that its economic blueprint was a “copy cat” of government’s policies, and was a “desperate attempt for political survival as the opposition party continues to slide into political oblivion”(Sunday News, 1/02). Like The Herald the paper did not explain how RESTART was a replica of government policies.

The hypocrisy of the government media was exposed when the MDC policy was officially launched. Instead of covering highlights of the document, The Herald (30/1) chose to ridicule it and Tsvangirai’s speech. The paper also ignored government attempts to ban the event. ZBC and Chronicle (30/1) ignored the launch altogether.

Studio 7 (29/1), The Daily News, The Zimbabwe Independent (30/1) and The Standard (1/2) however, exposed the police intolerance and The Daily News and SW Radio Africa also publicized the main points of the policy.

Like the government media however, the private media also failed or investigate why the MDC assumed it would be in office by July. Nor was there any effort to link the party’s optimism with other political developments, such as the insistence by South African President Mbeki that there would be a resolution to the Zimbabwean crisis by June this year.

Meanwhile, The Herald (29/1) continued to accuse the MDC of causing problems in order to gain power. It distorted the purpose of the MDC’s lobby at the EU to renew its targeted sanctions against members of ZANU PF and presented it as the opposition’s campaign “for more sanctions against Zimbabwe”. Its comment (30/1) then claimed government’s efforts to revive the economy had forced the MDC to seek “sanctions” because “economic stability removes protest and in the case of Zimbabwe makes the MDC irrelevant…”

The real purpose for the MDC’s call for targeted sanctions appeared in the Zimbabwe Independent. It quoted MDC deputy president Gibson Sibanda as saying the renewal of targeted sanctions was meant to “put more pressure on Mugabe to come to the negotiating table”.

Mukonoweshuro made similar observations on Studio 7 (28/1).

3. Credibility heist

MMPZ notes that the government controlled media’s fixation with peddling reckless inventions and falsehoods to malign the MDC has resulted in The Herald (30/1) retracting two stories it published in January 2002 accusing the MDC of evil machinations aimed at fostering economic and political chaos.

The stories alleged - without a shred of evidence - that the MDC was involved in a $2 billion South African heist and that the opposition party was responsible for a series of anthrax attacks in Harare in the run-up to the Presidential election.

But the paper buried its admissions of guilt on an inside page while the original stories were splashed on its front page. Nor did it state why it was apologizing for the deliberately false stories it published more than two years ago.

The Standard (1/2) however, revealed that the paper was compelled to do so by an MDC lawsuit challenging the paper’s fabrications.

4. Food security and agriculture

The debate on the Central Bank’s new monetary policy, which has dominated media space since its launch last year, has distracted the media from fully reporting other pertinent issues, such as the country’s food security.

The government-controlled media appeared to be the worst culprits in this regard as their coverage on the matter was mainly characterized by inconsistencies. For example, out of the eight stories ZBC carried forecasting agricultural output for the 2003/4 season, three predicted good harvests and the rest famine. No effort was made to reconcile the two extremes.

Despite the government media’s contradictions over the farming fortunes of the current agricultural season, they continued to gloss over the lack of production on farms.

Power FM, (29/10, 6am) for example, reported that the Land Bank had received $50billion from government as part of an initial $165billion allocated for lending to farmers. There was no attempt by the station to establish how many farmers had so far benefited from such funds. Instead, the announcement was followed by positive reactions from the Zimbabwe Farmers’ Union (ZFU) President, Silas Hungwe, who said the gesture “shows that government was committed to the success of land reform”, (ZTV, 26/01, 6pm and Radio Zimbabwe, 26/01, 1pm). ZBC did not explore Hungwe’s concern that the “money should be used by real farmers and not used for dubious purposes”.

Although the private media gave the topic scant attention, they at least tried to inform their audiences of the country’s perilous food insecurity. For example, The Standard (1/2), quoting a recent Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FewsNet) survey, revealed that Zimbabwe’s 2003/4 season is likely to produce a harvest of between 800,000 to 900,000 tonnes, or 33 and 38 percent below the national cereal requirement for the country.

In another report, the paper revealed that the country was already importing wheat because “the domestic supply of wheat, harvested in November, was now exhausted” since only 80,000 tonnes of the crop out of a normal requirement of 350,000 tonnes was produced.

ZTV (27/01, 8pm) would not openly admit this. It only reported that government was making efforts to “overcome grain deficits through winter cropping”.

The implied acknowledgement of grain shortages found greater impetus when Agriculture Minister Joseph Made was quoted in the same bulletin as admitting there was a “possibility” of a drought and that government should intervene with “supplementary irrigation”.

But while the government media papered over the real nature of the country’s food security situation, The Daily News (30/1) was more explicit. It reported that the latest FewsNet statistics revealed that the number of people needing food aid had risen to 7,5 million, up from the previously estimated 5.5 million. The paper quoted the World Food Programme (WFP) spokeswoman, Makena Walker, explaining that the rapid economic decline, closure of factories and industries and high inflation had caused the upsurge in the figure. The Standard also carried a similar report.

Amid such revelations of widespread poverty in the country, The Daily News and SW Radio Africa (27/1) reported that the government-run Grain Marketing Board (GMB) was stockpiling 240 000 tonnes of maize harvested last year.

Even The Herald (30/1) story, State buys 70 000 tonnes of maize from S. Africa confirmed the report and quoted GMB chief executive Colonel Samuel Muvuti saying the maize was kept as “strategic reserves for the nation and can only be released if a distress call is raised”.

However, instead of challenging him on why government was not releasing the food in the face of such prevalent starvation, the paper allowed him to describe The Daily News report as “mischievous and designed to malign the Government and give the impression that it was being insensitive to the plight of the people”.

Despite the adverse effects of land reform programme on the country’s food security, Made warned of more land seizures saying, “the land war is far from over… the enemy is still out there”, The Herald (29/1)

Ends.

The MEDIA UPDATE was produced and circulated by the Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe, 15 Duthie Avenue, Alexandra Park, Harare, Tel/fax: 263 4 703702, E-mail: [email protected]

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