The Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe

Monday November 7th – Sunday November 14th 2004

Weekly Media Update 2004-45

CONTENTS

1. GENERAL COMMENT

2. ECONOMIC ISSUES

3. FOOD SECURITY AND AGRICULTURE

1. General comment

THIS week The Herald provided more evidence of the government media’s compulsive disinformation campaign aimed at sprucing up President Mugabe’s international stature when it misrepresented details of the meeting between the Zimbabwean leader and Moroccan Foreign Affairs Minister Mohammed Benaissa.

The paper’s (9/11) report claimed that Morocco had, via Benaissa, “extended an invitation to President Mugabe to help mediate in the conflict over the Saharawi”.

No hard evidence was provided to substantiate this claim. But the paper used the opportunity to project President Mugabe as an experienced peace-broker by chronicling a number of African conflicts which Mugabe has played a role in solving.

Only the Zimbabwe Independent three days later (12/11) reported that The Herald story was false. The private weekly reported Moroccan authorities as having denied that they had asked President Mugabe to mediate in the Saharawi conflict, saying Benaissa’s visit was only an “affirmation of Morocco’s willingness to promote bilateral relations with Zimbabwe” adding that similar gestures have been made to other SADC, East and Central African countries.

Despite this clarification, The Herald did not correct its story.

In another matter, The Herald (10/11) blatantly misrepresented parliamentary proceedings when it unprofessionally presented the Parliamentary Legal Committee (PLC)’s adverse report on the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission Bill as reflecting the views of the MDC in its lead story, headlined ‘MDC Opposes Poll Reforms’.

The Daily Mirror (11/11) revealed that the MDC had raised concerns over the story saying The Herald should be charged with contempt of Parliament for misrepresenting proceedings in the House.

Although The Herald carried the opposition’s sentiments the following day (11/11), it openly displayed its disdain for their concerns when it continued presenting the PLC report as the opinion of the MDC in its comment, MDC wants to score points with supporters.

Notably, the government-appointed Media and Information Commission was conspicuous by its deafening silence on such distortions, which are offences under the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act, a repressive law the commission has used selectively to silence the private media.

Its failure to reprimand the paper for such offences clearly exposes the partisan nature of the commission and vindicates independent media institutions’ call for its dissolution and its replacement with a truly independent and self-regulatory body.

Meanwhile, those who rely on the dominant government media as sources of information, remained in the dark of the fact that the Supreme Court has upheld the nullification of two parliamentary elections results for Gokwe North and Gokwe South constituencies held by ZANU-PF.

This followed the failure by the ZANU PF MPs’ lawyers to file their appeal papers with the court within the specified time.

While The Daily Mirror (12/11) and The Standard (11/11) reported this pertinent development, the government media simply censored the news. Similarly, they also censored all detail of the Parliamentary Legal Committee’s adverse report on the controversial NGO Bill, reporting instead, that it was ‘thrown out’ after a record sitting of parliament (18/11).

These blatant efforts to prevent such news from reaching the public domain clearly portrays their partisanship and justifies calls for the repeal of the repressive media laws that have stifled the establishment of additional, more reliable sources of information.

2. Economic Issues

THE government media continued to report the state of Zimbabwe’s economy as being on the road to recovery, despite the fact that economic indicators on the ground, such as persistent fuel shortages and galloping increases in commodity prices and service charges, signalled otherwise.

These symptoms of a troubled economy were generally glossed over by the government media, although they did attempt to provide an explanation for the fuel shortages. This was blamed on the recently formed private oil companies’ consortium, the Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV), which was failing to coordinate its payment and supply system, according to “sources” in The Sunday Mail (14/11). In reporting a jump in the price of fuel, the paper said that SPV chairman Gordon Musariri had referred all questions to Energy Minister July Moyo, who was quoted saying he needed time to “study the issue”.

Earlier, The Herald (11/11) reported, without any substantiation, that “some companies allocated foreign currency through the auctions to buy fuel were either selling this entitlement or were importing non-petroleum products”.

This allegation received some credibility when the paper reported the following Monday (15/11) that a Reserve Bank audit had discovered US $12,4 million allocated for fuel imports could not be accounted for. But the paper didn’t ask Musariri or the SPV’s parent Petroleum Marketers’ Association (PMA) to explain, and The Sunday Mail didn’t ask Musariri why he thought the government might have answers for a problem arising in what has ostensibly become a deregulated private sector as claimed by The Herald.

Only The Daily Mirror (12/11) lifted the veil on the obscurity surrounding the causes of the shortages by reporting that the PMA and the government had failed to agree on the magnitude of the price increase.

The private weeklies ignored this issue, as did the independent radio stations, except for SW Radio Africa quoting a The Herald’s story.

Their inexplicable silence on the fuel crisis merely provided the official media greater latitude to mislead the public on the exact position of the matter.

As a result, the lack of additional alternative daily sources of information could not have been more acutely felt.

Notwithstanding this however, the private media did expose government’s simplistic portrayal of the economy’s revival (mainly through the Reserve Bank Governor’s monetary policy) by highlighting some of the deep-seated economic problems that still needed to be addressed to achieve economic stability.

But the government media skirted such discussions and failed to relate the real cause of the fuel shortage and food price increases to the wider context of Zimbabwe’s precarious foreign currency position or its diminished production capacity.

Instead, The Herald’s story accusing PMA members of misappropriating their forex allocations (11/11) reported how the National Oil Company of Zimbabwe – the government’s fuel procurement arm – had “saved the day” by releasing its “stocks” to help ease the shortages.

While similar sentiments were echoed on Power FM (9/11,6pm), Radio Zimbabwe (9/11,8pm) and ZTV (10/11,8pm), no effort was made to identify these oil companies or query why the authorities had not punished them.

Missing too were details on the exact amount of foreign currency these companies were getting from the central bank and whether it was enough considering the country’s crippling foreign currency squeeze. Instead, The Herald (12/11) continued with its blame game in its comment, Private fuel firms must explain shortages.

And then came The Sunday Mail report (14/11) attributing the fuel shortages to the SPV’s failure to “secure fuel deliveries according to schedule”.

To buttress the impression that the authorities were playing their role as compared to the abdication of duty demonstrated by the private oil companies, the paper reported the RBZ allocating US$6 million weekly to the companies for fuel procurement.

This conflicted with an earlier ZTV report (9/11,8pm) claiming that RBZ Governor Gideon Gono had “ allocated an aggregated amount of $34 million per month” to the oil companies, a figure it contended, was “slightly” more than the “$30 million” worth of Zimbabwe’s monthly fuel needs. Once again, the PMA was not accessed to corroborate this assertion.

But The Daily Mirror (12/11) disputed the government media’s observations. It noted that the US$24million allocated to the oil companies was only enough to import 53 percent of the country’s fuel consumption of 85 million litres per month.

Though ZTV (9/11, 6pm & 8pm), Radio Zimbabwe (9/11, 8pm), and The Sunday Mail (14/11) announced the hikes in the price of fuel from $3 600 per litre to between $4 200 and $4 500, it was only The Daily Mirror that reported PMA as saying the prices still remained unviable. It reported that PMA wanted the fuel prices upped to between $5 500 to $7 000 per litre to match prices on the international market but that Gono and Energy Minister July Moyo were resisting the move because they feared this “ will have an inflationary effect on the (economic) turnaround initiatives”.

The government media’s blame-game did not end with the fuel shortage saga alone.

ZTV (9/11, 8pm) and Radio Zimbabwe (10/11, 6am) accused cattle producers, bent on “sabotaging the land reforms”, of being behind the recent increase in the price of commercial beef from $20 000 to $28 000 per kg through the creation of artificial shortages. This was regardless of a report by Power FM (10/11,6am) that cited abattoirs attributing the price hike to an increase in the prices of cattle at auctions.

The private weeklies and radio stations largely ignored these issues with The Financial Gazette (11/11) bizarrely opting to report on the aviation fuel shortages in Nigeria.

Nevertheless, they continued to subject government’s economic policies to scrutiny.

For example, the Zimbabwe Independent (12/11) observed that while the government media had excitedly reported on the recent Chinese visit as a demonstration of the successes of government’s much vaunted ‘Look East’ policy, “nothing will be gained from such populist illusions” as Zimbabwe could not afford isolation “from the world’s powerful economies”, especially “when multilateral lending institutions, which we still need badly, are still reluctant to resume business with us”.

In another report, the paper revealed that, contrary to government media’s claims of possible economic growth, economists were forecasting a further contraction of 5 percent by year-end. It quoted the economists saying the country’s economic problems, which include a flourishing foreign currency black market, high unemployment and erratic fuel supplies as harbingers of a bleak future.

However, the government media ignored such views.

Rather, the Chronicle (10/11) narrowly accused “some prophets of doom aligned” to the MDC of launching a campaign to discredit gains made by Gono’s reforms because the opposition wanted to use “economic deterioration, shortages of basic commodities” as its “tramp (sic) card to win next year’s parliamentary elections”.

The paper’s obsession with glorifying government’s economic polices resulted in it (11/11), and ZTV (10/11, 8pm), magnifying the launch, at the National Economic Consultative Forum (NECF) seminar, of the industrial development, the macro-economic policy framework and the indigenisation policies, which ZTV said would “improve the economy”.

No full explanation on the differences between the new policies and a myriad other economic strategies that government has launched before were given. But ZTV (10/11,8pm) claimed that since the last NECF dialogue, there had been economic improvements in the country that includes the “collapse of black market of basic goods, (and) tumbling rate of inflation”.

The Daily Mirror (11/11) however, questioned the effectiveness of these economic turnaround strategies. Citing the recent increase in the price of beef, the paper observed that most households were now “worse off than before” reinforcing “the fact that the so-called turnaround of the economy is still to benefit the man-in-the-street”.

3. Food Security and Agriculture

THE officially controlled media’s blind loyalty to government was again confirmed by the way they continued to downplay Zimbabwe’s food security concerns despite revelations by a Parliamentary committee exposing as fiction government’s claims that the country had produced more than 2.4 million tonnes of grain last season.

The government media have repeatedly flaunted the fairy tale claims of a bumper harvest to demonstrate that government’s controversial land reforms were a resounding success. It was no wonder therefore that when the findings of the parliamentary committee tasked with investigating government claims, confirmed earlier warnings of potential widespread food shortages in the country, these media became defensive.

For example, The Herald (12/11) passively let government officials trivialise the findings by dismissing them as having been shoddily compiled and “politicised”.

The paper quoted Social Welfare Minister Paul Mangwana saying the findings were “shallow (and) based on wrong logic”, adding: “it is simply supposed to convey the wrong political message”. However, the minister unwittingly acknowledged the country’s precarious food situation when he pointed out that government “was importing maize to build up its stocks”. Typically, The Herald did not question this hypocrisy, particularly in light of Agriculture Minister Joseph Made and President Mugabe’s previous claims that the country’s yield would suffice.

Only the Independent (12/11) reminded its readers of this background in its story on the committee’s report, while SW Radio Africa (12/11) reported Renson Gasela, one of the members of the committee, dismissing the government claims as “all doctored and designed to show that there is enough food when there is none at all.”

Interestingly, Radio Zimbabwe (9/11,1pm) reported Masvingo Governor Josiah Hungwe as having called on the authorities to distribute grain to the people in the province because they were facing starvation due to poor rains last season.

As if to add to Hungwe’s concern, SW Radio Africa (12/11) reported the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWSNET), a crop-monitoring agency, warning of even more widespread starvation in the country. It revealed that the 2,2 million people forecast earlier this year by the United Nations as requiring relief food would rise because food prices had more than doubled in the last five months well beyond the financial means of many Zimbabweans.

Meanwhile, the government media were reticent on the Parliamentary committee’s findings on wheat production, which the Independent revealed also exposed government’s projections of wheat yields as “inflated” because the country would experience a deficit of 62,000 tonnes.

The committee’s discoveries seemed to corroborate a Daily Mirror story (10/11) revealing that if the entire local wheat crop was harvested in time, the country would only reap 250,000 tonnes, which would still be far short of the national annual consumption of 450 000 tonnes.

However, the government media tried to underplay the potentially poor wheat harvest due to shortages of combine harvesters and transport to ferry the crop to the GMB (ZTV (11/11, 6pm) and Power FM (11/11, 8pm) by cushioning it with government announcements, ZTV (12/11, 8pm) and Power FM (13/11, 1pm), that it had released more than $190 billion for the purchase and transportation of wheat to GMB depots.

However, these media failed to question whether the financing was adequate or queried the wisdom of encouraging farmers to sell and transport their produce when some of them were unable to harvest it in the first place due to lack of harvesters.

The country’s crop production dilemma was given relevance by The Daily Mirror (10/11), which reported government as having failed to raise $250 billion required to support tobacco growers to produce the set target of 160 million kgs of the crop during the 2004/5 season.

The paper quoted a tobacco farmers’ representative saying even the $250 billion was not adequate to meet the target because growers needed about $3 trillion to realise such a yield.

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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