Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe
Monday August 18th – Sunday August 24th 2003
Media weekly update 2003-33

CONTENTS

1. ROCKET SCIENCE PROPAGANDA?
2. VOODOO ECONOMICS
3. ‘UNDENTING’ ZIMBABWE’S IMAGE

1. Rocket science propaganda?

DURING the week Information Minister Jonathan Moyo revealed through The Herald (21/8) and ZTV (21/8, 8pm) that he intends to expand his propaganda campaign to continental proportions with the help of satellite communications. Reportedly, Moyo and his Tanzanian counterpart signed an “agreement to co-operate in the media field”, which would see the two set up a 24-hour satellite news channel. ZTV quoted Moyo as saying the station will help in telling the “true African story”. Moyo did not clarify what he meant, but in the past the government’s spin doctor and the media he controls have narrowly defined such issues as the ‘African story’ from a ZANU-PF point of view while dismissing all other interpretations as neo-colonialist and pro-Western.

Meanwhile, there was some improvement in the coverage of this weekend’s local government elections, as well as the Makonde and Harare Central by-elections set for August 30-31. For example, this week the Press carried 20 stories compared to the 15 they carried the previous week. Thirteen of the stories were carried in the private Press and the rest in the government-controlled Press.
Only the private Press reported on politically motivated violence related to the polls. It carried three stories in which it recorded about five incidents of violence, allegedly by ZANU PF activists against MDC supporters and a ZANU PF councillor for Mutare’s ward five, who is standing as an independent. None of this was reported in the government-controlled Press.
In fact, five of the seven stories the government Press carried on the polls were on ZANU PF election campaigns while the rest were on government’s defence of the use of mobile polling stations and a court case in which Chegutu MDC candidates are challenging their forced exclusion from registering for the polls by alleged ZANU PF supporters.

Two of the 13 stories the private Press carried were on election irregularities, four on both the MDC and ZANU PF election campaigns and the rest on other related issues, such as the petition by the MDC’s Chegutu candidates and ZANU PF’s politicisation of relief food ahead of the polls.
ZTV carried 11 stories on the elections and all were about ZANU-PF campaign activities. Similarly, Radio Zimbabwe had 10 reports on the elections and all were on the ruling party’s activities. This was also the case with 3FM, which carried eight pro-ZANU PF stories.
Notably, Studio 7 did not cover the elections.

2. Voodoo economics

GOVERNMENT’S recent announcement of a $672 billion supplementary budget – premised once more on similar illusory economic fundamentals as the original one – clearly demonstrated why Zimbabwe’s ailing economy would remain in the intensive care unit.
Symptoms of such voodoo economics, as epitomised by galloping inflation, now officially 399.5 percent, and acute commodity shortages continued to dominate news reports. The Press carried about 156 stories on such issues and other related developments, 83 of which featured in the government-controlled Press and the rest in the private Press. However, most of the stories failed to translate into well-informed analyses that enlightened readers about the sad economic realities besieging the country. For example, none of the 83 stories the government-controlled Press carried ever investigated or queried the ruling ZANU PF’s complicity in Zimbabwe’s accelerated plunge towards economic meltdown. They either diverted readers’ attention from government’s shortcomings by blaming others, The Herald and Chronicle (20/8), or swamped them with government’s so-called successes in its fight against the current economic adversities (The Herald, 21/8), which the government controlled media now describe as “challenges”.
In fact, the government-controlled Press’ determination to shield government from public scrutiny manifested itself in the way it uncritically reported Finance Minister Herbert Murerwa’s supplementary budget presentation. Its five stories on the issue failed to question the economic relevance of the budget, especially when it was presented under a highly inflationary environment characterised by the fickle exchange rate of the Zimbabwe dollar against its US counterpart.

Such was the government-controlled media’s penchant for political correctness that The Sunday Mail (24/8) and ZBC (24/8, 1pm) reported about how the controversial National Youth Service Programme, viewed by government opponents as ZANU PF’s indoctrination nerve centre, had received “a major boost” after Murerwa allocated it an additional $1.5 billion under the supplementary budget.

However, in a rare display of professionalism, ZBC sought alternative viewpoints on the budget. For example, ZTV (22/08, 8pm) quoted an economic analyst, Farai Zizhou, as saying the budget would worsen inflation saying “The Minister (Herbert Murerwa) has talked about the need to take measures that will contain inflation but then with a rising budget deficit it is difficult for the economy to actually attain any lower inflation.” Another economist, Andy Hodges, was quoted, on the station’s 6pm bulletin of the same day, as saying “ the supplementary budget deals with consumptive spending…it’s all about salary increases…it really isn’t a supplementary (budget) to stimulate the economy.”
But then, ZTV swamped these rarely candid observations with reports that gave the impression that the budget was the right tonic for the economy.

The Herald and Chronicle (23/8) appeared equally clueless. They seemed obsessed with celebrating a “major boost” for Zimbabwe’s contentious land reforms, which was allotted $45 billion in the budget to finance crop inputs and livestock production. The papers and ZBC did not question how government would finance the supplementary budget, as did Studio 7 (21/08).
Moreover, the government-controlled media were silent on what exchange rate the supplementary budget was based on considering that it was hyper-inflation and a new exchange rate introduced last February under government’s National Economic Revival Programme that made nonsense of the original budget and required the submission of the supplementary one.

The private media hardly performed any better. For example, the private Press only carried five stories on the budget; three of which were carried in The Daily News (21, 22 and 23/8) while The Zimbabwe Independent (22/8) and The Weekend Tribune (23/8) each carried a single story.

However, unlike the government-controlled Press, the three papers were critical of the budget. For example, The Daily News (23/8) quoted University of Zimbabwe business studies lecturer Anthony Hawkins as saying it was difficult to take the supplementary budget “seriously” because it did not make sense to “increase the budget deficit” when “inflation is a problem”. He dismissed Murerwa’s prediction that agriculture would recover by 2.3 percent this year by noting that the minister had earlier “claimed that inflation will be 96 percent by the end of this year”. Zimbabwe National Chamber of Commerce official James Johwa was also quoted in the same story rebutting Murerwa’s agricultural forecast as “a big lie”, as “we have messed up the land reform (and) there is no agriculture to talk about”, while economist John Robertson believed that a political solution was the only way out of the economic crisis. MDC’s shadow finance minister Tendai Biti had no kind words for the government’s supplementary budget either. The Zimbabwe Independent quoted him dismissing it as “a criminal budget that is meant to legitimise government’s fiscal indiscipline”, adding “they (government) have found a proper way to strip state assets before their exit”.

Churning out sanitised reports about government’s supplementary budget was not the only professional sin committed by the government-controlled media. They also attempted to stifle the facts behind Zimbabwe’s worsening cash shortage and food insecurity. Thus, ZTV (19/08 8pm), The Herald (20, 21/8) and Chronicle (20/8) became preoccupied with unquestioningly endorsing observations, especially by ZANU PF MPs Victor Chitongo and David Chapfika, that the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) was the sole author of the current cash shortage. They deliberately ignored the fact that a failure by the RBZ automatically translated into a flop by government because the central bank was not autonomous as it worked under the jurisdiction of the finance ministry.
However, The Zimbabwe Independent and Studio 7 (20/8) quoted Johwa duly making the connection. He was quoted in The Zimbabwe Independent as saying government was only “passing the buck on the cash crisis because they are trying to exonerate themselves from their economic mismanagement”.

If the government-controlled media was not blaming the RBZ, it was setting up more smokescreens for government’s incompetence by blaming certain sections of society, such as “detractors of the government” (ZTV, 23/08 8pm & 3FM, 23/08 1pm) and cross-border traders, who were accused of externalising large sums of money (The Herald 18/8).These claims however, seemed to contradict those by the Zimbabwe Revenue Authority public relations officer Priscilla Sadomba who told The Sunday Mail (24/8) that there was a slow response to the government’s August 24 deadline waiving restrictions on Zimbabweans returning externalised local currency.
To buttress the notion that people hoarding money were the cause of the shortages, the government-controlled Press ran four reports of the police arresting individuals in possession of millions of dollars.

Meanwhile, the issue of travellers’ cheques (TCs) continued to receive a fair share of critical analysis from both sections of the media. In an unusual show of unity, all media generally agreed the TCs would not be an effective solution to the cash crisis. However, there was no such concurrence between the two over the reasons bedevilling food shortages in the country. While the private media attributed Zimbabwe’s food shortages to government’s ill-devised policies, the government media was relentless in its partisanship. For example, they all failed to explore the ruinous consequences of government plans to politicise food aid by demanding that international relief agencies surrender their food distribution role to village headmen, a topic raised by The Daily News (19/8). Social Welfare Minister July Moyo reportedly issued the directive, a contradiction of President Mugabe’s assurance last year to World Food Programme director James Morris that his government would not interfere in NGOs’ food aid distribution.

The government-controlled media also ignored the resultant threats by the international food aid donors that they would stop distributing food to Zimbabwe’s starving masses if government insisted they abdicate distribution to headmen, who are on the government payroll (Studio 7, 20/8 and The Daily News, 22/8). Nor was there any attempt to find out how the order would affect Zimbabwe’s 5.5 million hungry people. Instead, the Chronicle (20/8) tried to blame such disastrous policies on MDC “political upstarts…and the gutter Press”, that it said, “are taking the government to task on its policy that NGOs should work hand in glove with local authorities…in the distribution of food”.
The blame game intensified towards the end of the week with The Manica Post (22/8) reporting that traditional leaders in Mutare had attacked NGOs for sidelining them and politicising food aid in favour of the MDC. But no evidence was provided to support this claim.

3. ‘Undenting’ Zimbabwe’s image
THE government-controlled media’s role as a public relations organ for the authorities was evident in the way it suppressed socio-political stories with the potential to further dent the public image of the ZANU PF government. As a result, their audiences remained uninformed on the extent to which government’s decisions - sometimes with the complicity of fellow African governments - have contributed to the deteriorating political situation in the country.

While the private media was not inhibited by such political leanings, their stories on the issue lacked a holistic approach, relying more on the events themselves rather than on the processes. For example, although The Daily News (20, 21/8) and The Zimbabwe Independent (22/8) blew the whistle on how African countries appear reluctant to act decisively to solve Zimbabwe’s political crisis, they failed to fully relate these events in the context of seemingly wider conspiracies to protect ZANU PF’s image at the expense of ordinary Zimbabweans.
At least The Zimbabwe Independent story, Commission blocks damning Zim report, noted that the refusal by the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights to release the report of its human rights probe into the country was meant to protect Mugabe’s image ahead of a Commonwealth Summit to be held in Nigeria in December. It also observed that previous reports on Zimbabwe’s poor human rights record by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch “have been rejected by African states who accuse the two of Western bias”.

The government-controlled Press, on the other hand, remained silent over these allegations. Eight of the nine stories it carried merely glossed over the deep political crisis in the country by trying to promote a sense of normality. So determined was the government Press to sell this idea to its readers that it carried four stories, The Herald (19, 20, 22/8), on how government and the MDC-dominated Harare City Council had resolved to work together. But nowhere in the reports were the councillors ever quoted confirming that the root of their disagreement with government had indeed been eradicated.

Besides papering over the uneasy political situation through propaganda disguised as news, the government-controlled Press also tried to stifle other voices that described different situations. The Herald (23/8) carried a personal tirade against Australian Prime Minister John Howard for calling Mugabe an “unelected despot”, while The Sunday Mail (24/8) appeared relieved that the Zimbabwe Medical Association (ZIMA) had refused to amend its constitution to incorporate a doctors’ human rights watchdog, the Zimbabwe Association of Doctors for Human Rights (ZADHR). ZADHR, which the paper accused of “having a political agenda to demonise the Zimbabwe government” and of being a creation of Britain “was allegedly formed to prepare a dossier meant to document false accusations of human rights abuses by the government …”
In fact, this was an echo of an earlier ZTV (20/8, 8pm) report on ZADHR. ZTV actually allocated 11 minutes and 25seconds, or 57 percent of its bulletin (excluding business, sport and weather) to the issue. It dismissed the doctors’ organisation as a “clique of doctors” including “some former white commercial farmers”, whose objective was to “dent the image of Zimbabwe” as it had a “political agenda against government. ” Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa was quoted alleging: “ It would appear that their intention is to raise funds from gullible donor communities outside the country who have been fed on propaganda that there are human rights abuses in this country…the human rights abuses do not exist.”

However, the private media continued to unearth evidence that exposed this fallacy. For example, Studio 7 (20/8) reported that, “ eight people have died this year in politically motivated violence,” adding that, “freedom of expression is virtually non-existent.” And the private Press carried 16 stories on the erosion of basic human rights and other related issues.
Even some ZANU PF MPs seemed fed up with the deteriorating situation. The Weekend Tribune (24/8) reported ZANU PF legislators Victor Chitongo and Charles Majange criticizing the country’s state of affairs during a parliamentary session. Chitongo reportedly took government to task over the introduction of travellers’ cheques, while Majange rebuked government against “adopting a confrontational attitude with Western countries” such as Britain and America.
The government media suffocated this although they covered the same parliamentary event.
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]; [email protected]

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