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Weekly Media update 2003 - 1
Government recently announced its intention to establish information kiosks in the rural areas to expand the available sources of information at the disposal of the rural populace. Although this is laudable, the media should expose and analyze the underlying intentions of the move.
In fact the Ministry of Information and Publicity Secretary George Charamba (ZTV, 4/01, 8pm) hinted at the kind of information the kiosks would peddle. He is quoted: “There is no way we are going to use money from national coffers to promote material that undermines national interest. That we will not entertain at all. There is no way that we are going to use money from national coffers to promote material that offends…community cultural values… People who are providing content must realize that they are providing it to Zimbabwean people who wish to remain Zimbabwean. In terms of their politics, in terms of their culture and in terms of their social being”.
In the past, government has narrowly defined issues of ‘national interest’ and ‘Zimbabwean cultural values’ from a ZANU PF point of view, while dismissing other interpretations as pro-opposition and anti-Zimbabwe.
Sadly, its viewpoint has found currency in the media it controls.
It is therefore imperative that the private media should be tenacious in investigating such seemingly harmless government policies, which could severely curtail the citizens’ right to access information of their choice. The free flow of information is the cornerstone upon which democratic societies are built.
Meanwhile, MMPZ notes with great concern the conflicting figures that the media records in their reports on certain issues.
For example, readers of both the public and the private Press were confused as to how many people were arrested following the demonstration by ZANU PF supporters and war veterans against the distribution of relief food by the Grain Marketing Board (GMB) in Bulawayo recently.
Initially, The Daily News, The Herald, and Chronicle (7/1) reported that 37 people had been arrested.
However, the following day The Daily News (8/1) and The Financial Gazette (9/1) reported that 34 people had been arrested.
In another case, both The Sunday Mail and The Standard (12/1) carried conflicting statistics on the number of people arrested together with Harare Mayor Elias Mudzuri in Mabvuku on January 11th. While The Sunday Mail reported that Mudzuri was arrested together with 20 other people, The Standard recorded 21.
MMPZ urges the media to pay more attention to such detail, as such tendencies further confuse readers who are already subjected to partisan media reports in this heavily polarized media environment.
Local government wrangles
The public media’s role as government’s megaphone was exposed when they unquestioningly endorsed government’s decision to appoint governors for Harare and Bulawayo and its expansion of a commission appointed last year, ostensibly to assist Harare City Council develop a turn-around plan for the capital. Furthermore, the government controlled media continued to be used as conduits for government’s relentless campaign to discredit Harare’s council and particularly its mayor, Elias Mudzuri.
For example, out of the 17 stories the public Press published on the conflict between the opposition MDC-led Harare City Council and Local Government Minister Ignatius Chombo, 15 were in support of government while the rest were neutral announcements. ZTV carried seven reports in its 8pm bulletin on the issue. All reports, which occupied 10% of the total time allocated to 8pm news during the week, portrayed Mudzuri in a bad light. 3FM carried nine council-related stories in its main news bulletins. And like ZTV, all were negative depictions of Mudzuri.
Conversely, the private Press carried 19 stories on the conflict: 10 reports accorded Mudzuri a platform to give his side of the story, eight were neutral and the remainder favoured government.
The public media’s pro-government coverage of the Chombo/Mudzuri wrangle was basically achieved through simplistic manipulation of popular sentiments (The Herald (9/1), Demonstration thwarted); propaganda disguised as news (The Herald (7/1), Mudzuri admits interfering in tenders); and partisan reports masquerading as public consensus on government policy (Chronicle, (9/1), Governors’ appointment hailed).
In fact, while the bias demonstrated by the public media seemed to stem purely from its pursuance of government’s political agenda, the pro-MDC standpoint adopted by the private media was seemingly triggered mostly by its desire to counter distortions carried in the public media in the first place.
A classic example was The Herald (7/1) and Daily News’ (9/1) coverage of Mudzuri’s alleged “interference” in the Harare City Council’s refuse collection tenders.
Whereas The Herald (and ZBC-ZTV & 3FM, 6/01, 8pm) seemed hell-bent on criminalizing Mudzuri’s “interference” in the tender process out of context, The Daily News on the other hand provided the mayor with the platform to make “his comments in full”, which he alleged The Herald had selectively used.
Indeed, The Herald story withheld some of the background as to why the mayor had interfered in the tender. Neither did it adequately avail the information in the “documents” it said were in its possession.
But The Daily News established that Mudzuri was compelled to query the city council’s tender specification for refuse collection after discovering that there was a clause “which virtually excluded new players”, and in the process protected the companies that were given contracts by the then ZANU PF council led by Solomon Tawengwa in August 1997. Most of the companies are linked to ZANU PF officials.
And contrary to the impression created by The Herald report that Mudzuri did not consult his officers to have the tender clause changed to accommodate new players, The Daily News established that Josephine Ncube, the council’s Chamber Secretary, its top legal adviser and Joseph Issa, the council’s audit manager, had agreed that there was merit in Mudzuri’s concerns.
Still, The Herald (9/1) continued to malign the mayor whom it accused “of flouting tender procedures (in order) to give an unfair advantage to some companies”.
To lend credence to its claims, The Daily News (10/1) carried a story in which it alleged that Highdon, a company owned by Mcdonald Chapfika, brother to ZANU PF’s MP for Mutoko North, had prejudiced the council of more than $118 million through overcharging.
Highdon is contracted to supply water chemicals to the city council. However, Mcdonald denied the allegations.
Equally unprofessional was the manner in which The Herald (9/1) misrepresented facts pertaining to a foiled demonstration by MDC activists protesting against Chombo’s alleged interference in the affairs of the council.
The paper untruthfully attributed the failure of the protest to poor attendance, while in reality, the demonstration failed to take off because it was quashed by the police, SW Radio Africa (8/01), The Daily News, Financial Gazette and Daily Mirror (9/1).
In fact, the assertion by the paper also contradicted the substance of its headline, Demonstration thwarted.
Significant too, was the public media’s unquestioning acceptance of government’s announcement that it would appoint governors for Harare and Bulawayo to coordinate development in the cities, The Herald and Chronicle (6/1).
ZBC (ZTV, 7/01 & Radio Zimbabwe, 8pm) legitimized the move by quoting Chombo as saying: “This is actually a correction of an anomaly where a province as big as Harare, …and Bulawayo … is not represented by a governor, yet smaller provinces like Matabeleland North, Matabeleland South, Mashonaland Central … have a governor representing them. … So it was a disservice to those two metropolitan cities not to have governors and district administrators”.
While Chombo was quoted, in the same bulletins, as having said, “the appointment of governors should not be viewed as a ploy to monitor the activities of the MDC executive mayors”, his subsequent statement (on ZTV) exposed government’s machinations.
He stated: “It is not a political gimmick. It cannot be a political gimmick to improve the service provision in this town or in Bulawayo. …We want residents in those said provinces to receive services that they are paying for. We want government through that system to provide whatever it is (sic) intends to provide.”
However, his statement, which actually confirmed that the governors are set to encroach into areas of municipal jurisdiction such as providing services to residents, escaped ZBC’s analytical capacity.
The public broadcaster actually attempted to use Mudzuri to endorse the move. Alleging that he had “refused to speak in front of cameras”, ZTV quotedMudzuri as having said: “The appointment of a governor for Harare Province would not in any way affect the operations of the city council which he said is not bound by any law to obey orders from governors” adding “Mudzuri’s statements are contrary to speculation that the city council is against the appointment of governors”.
ZBC also nonchalantly reported further attempts by government to clip the powers of the MDC-led municipalities by expanding the committee it appointed to ostensibly assist in the administration of Harare, (ZTV & 3FM, 8/01, 8pm) and its appointment of a three-member committee to “bring sanity” into Chegutu municipality (11/01, 8pm).
So passive and partisan was the public media that their reports on this government interference in the running of MDC-led councils hinged heavily either on government or ruling ZANU PF officials. They also failed to come up with a clear analysis of how duties and responsibilities would be distributed between the elected mayors, councilors and government-appointed governors and committees without duplication.
By contrast, the private media challenged Chombo’s sincerity in proposing the appointments considering his uneasy working relationship with Mudzuri. Its sourcing too was more diverse. It ranged from government officials, social commentators, to ordinary citizens.
Besides, the private media interpreted the move as government’s covert plan to neutralize the MDC’s influence in Zimbabwe’s biggest cities, The Daily Mirror and Zimbabwe Independent of the same day (10/1).
The Daily Mirror quoted Harare residents as querying Chombo’s sudden interest in council business, while The Zimbabwe Independent noted in its editorial that “the so-called anomaly about Harare and Bulawayo going without governors for 22 years is ZANU PF’s attempt to vitiate the powers of executive mayors and impose its own pernicious policies on residents of MDC controlled cities.”
Notwithstanding this, both the public and private media was unable to fully explore the burden the appointments were likely to inflict on the fiscus, what the would-be governors briefs would be and whether those areas run by both governors and mayors were indeed better “coordinated” than Harare and Bulawayo.
Meanwhile, the polarity between the private and the public media in covering the Harare council issues was further exposed in their reports of the arrest of Mudzuri in Mabvuku for allegedly “addressing an illegal meeting”. While ZBC (11/1, 8pm) and The Sunday Mail (12/1) presented the arrest as normal execution of the rule of law, The Standard (12/1) interpreted the arrest as signaling “the country’s slide into a police state”. The paper reported that Mudzuri and 21 other people including councilors, were arrested when they were explaining to residents “the truth surrounding the crippling water crisis”, a position dismissed by The Sunday Mail. The paper quoted police Superintendent Brighton Mudzamiri as having said “the gathering was a group of youths that police strongly suspect to be MDC supporters”.
Food shortages and clashes
Media reports on the outbreak of Zimbabwe’s first serious food disturbances in Bulawayo and Chitungwiza since food shortages hit the country about a year ago exposed a disturbing sloppiness in interpretive skills among local journalists, especially those from the public media.
Except for the feature, Food Riots ‘a sign of more to come’ by The Financial Gazette (9/1) and a Reuter story carried in The Daily News (8/1), War veteran Sibanda linked to food protest, no other paper attempted to scrutinize fully the underlying causes or implications of the disturbances.
More disturbing was the professional hypocrisy shown by the public media, which apparently shortchanged its audiences by trying to shield the identities and political affiliations of the instigators of the violence.
For example, The Herald (7/1) was evasive about the identity of the “youths” it reported as having clashed with the police “over the control of food queues at a Supermarket in Chitungwiza”, resulting in injuries to four police officers.
Only The Daily News (6/1 and 7/1), SW Radio Africa (6/1) and The Daily Mirror (7/1) identified the youths as products of government’s National Youth Service.
The nearest The Herald came to linking the food disturbances to the National Service Youths was when it quoted an equally guarded police spokesperson, Wayne Bvudzijena, as saying it was difficult to establish “whether the youths who clashed with the police were an organized group or not, though some of them put on uniforms similar to those worn by youths from the National Youth Service Programme”.
Also notable was the paper’s failure to ask Bvudzijena whether his timely warning to “organized groups” against the usurping of the powers of the police force was, in this instance, an admission to a souring of relations between the police force and National Youth Service members over the clash of duties.
The Daily Mirror’s story (7/1), ‘Gezi youths’ not ZRP – Ministry’, also missed this news peg and so did the rest of the Press. However, the paper cited an unnamed Youth Ministry official – under whose portfolio the National Youth Service falls – as saying the youths “were not necessarily an extension of the police force and it was impossible for them to overtake the police’s responsibility”.
Added the official: “…These are just young people who were trained to be patriotic and, of course, they can effect a citizen’s arrest just like any other person.”
Again the paper failed to ask the official why, if the youths did not wield any special powers, they were acting like a terror group that exercised extreme powers.
If the public Press tried to mask the identity of the group behind the Chitungwiza food fracas, it also downplayed the political affiliations of 37 people arrested by the police for attempting to storm the state-run GMB depot in Bulawayo over alleged unfair distribution of relief maize.
Both The Herald and Chronicle of the same day (7/1) carried similar follow-up stories, on the court appearances of those arrested, but omitted to inform their readers that the accused were either ZANU PF activists or war veterans. Also, ZTV (6/01, 8pm) initially masked the political affiliation of the culprits describing those who besieged the GMB as “some residents of Bulawayo”. It was later (9/01, 8pm) in its follow-up that the station reported that the accused were ZANU PF supporters and war veterans.
Meanwhile, The Daily News (7/1) report on the court case did not display such insincerity but observed that “scores of ZANU PF supporters crowded the Western Commonage Court in solidarity with 37 of their colleagues arrested after last Friday’s food riots”.
However, Bvudzijena could not divulge the political identity of the accused although The Daily News (8/1) quoted him as saying the protesters demonstrated at the instigation of politicians.
While most of the media appeared content to treat the food disturbances as piecemeal, one-off events, The Financial Gazette put an interpretive touch to it. It quoted political and economic commentators as warning that the food riots could as well herald the beginning of a showdown between government and a restless population facing unprecedented shortages of many basic goods.
In fact, the private Press was replete with updates, hard news items and features on the continued commodity shortages and the ever-increasing hostile economic conditions in the country, worsened by a corruption epidemic within the ranks of government’s various relief distribution chains.
Unfortunately, such professional zeal to adequately inform the public about the true economic picture of the country was not matched by the public media.
Instead, just like it did in its last year’s coverage of the crippling current fuel shortages, ZBC (6 &9/01, 8pm) narrowly blamed the food shortages on corruption within the state-run GMB. The National Oil Company of Zimbabwe, another parastatal, was equally accused of corruption, which the public media alleged was the main cause of fuel shortages. But of course they made no effort to inquire from government or the police what they were doing to put an end to this corruption.
Ends.
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