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Local governance issues in the print media July - September 2001 (Excerpts)
Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe (MMPZ)
October 25, 2001

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Introduction
This report seeks to highlight coverage of local governance issues in the private and public press. The research covered Harare and Bulawayo, the two major cities in Zimbabwe. Both cities have relatively well-organized residents’ associations in the Combined Harare Residents Association (CHRA) and the Bulawayo United Residents Association (BURA) respectively. It is also in these cities that most of the media analyzed are based. For example, all privately owned newspapers have head offices in Harare and bureaux in Bulawayo.

The report covers three months, i.e. July, August and September. The media analyzed are the government owned Zimpapers (The Herald, The Chronicle, The Sunday Mail and The Sunday News) and the private press (The Financial Gazette, The Zimbabwe Independent, The Zimbabwe Mirror and The Daily News).

The study coincided with the end of term for the city of Harare’s government-appointed commission. Since 1998, residents in Harare have not had an elected council following the suspension of the Solomon Tawengwa-led council by the Minister of Local Government and Housing, at the time John Nkomo.

This was followed by a campaign by Harare residents, operating under the auspices of the Combined Harare Residents Association (CHRA), to take government to court over the Harare Commission’s continued term in office.

Towards the end of the period under review, the Bulawayo local government by-elections received prominent coverage in all newspapers monitored. Incidentally, were it not for these elections, The Zimbabwe Mirror would not have had a single news story on local governance issues in Harare or Bulawayo in three months!

Summary of findings

• 224 stories directly dealing with local government and residents’ issues were analyzed in all the newspapers. The number of stories in each newspaper is shown in Appendix 3. As expected, the dailies had a comparatively high number of stories in the period compared to the weeklies. In general, the research points to scant coverage of local governance issues in the printed media. In all the newspapers monitored, the number of stories was enhanced by the local government elections in Bulawayo held on the 8^th and 9^th September.
• Stories on council affairs focused on problems the two cities had in increasing their revenue collection. Issues relating to council accounts and health issues were a rare feature in the news. Council accounts call for more media attention given the fact that, for example, Harare City Council’s accounts have not been audited since 1998. The Herald and The Chronicle and the Zimbabwe Independent consistently followed up the issue of city accounts in Harare and Bulawayo respectively. However, the coverage in the dailies did not go beyond sourcing comment from council officials and an over-reliance on council minutes. The Herald even covered, uncritically, plans by the Harare Commission to implement activities that were not budgeted for. The Zimbabwe Independent stereotyped the Commission running Harare City Council’s affairs as "under-performing" and used residents associations as the only source for its information on critical issues relating to council accounts and health.
• The effect of government programmes on city planning was hardly covered in the weeklies. Examples include the effect of farm invasions and the railway transport projects in Harare and Bulawayo. The daily newspapers made reference to these and provided little to no analysis of the problems. Worse still, coverage became mired in support or criticism of the various projects and the obvious casualty was analysis the effect on city planning.
• The role of residents’ associations was recognized in all the newspapers. However, the media failed to reflect the "grassroots" nature of the association(s). All newspapers that quoted representatives of residents associations did not go beyond the Combined Harare Residents Association (CHRA) or the Bulawayo United Residents Association (BURA). Ordinary residents were quoted only in the context of localized issues such as burst water pipes or blocked sewers.
• There was a total lack of impartial voter education in all newspapers, especially ahead of the local government elections in Bulawayo. Worse still was the failure by all newspapers to analyse the electoral process. On the whole, coverage of the Bulawayo elections was polarized along party political lines. Consequently, the views of residents, the voters, were missing in all papers.  

Methodology
For all newspapers, all stories relating to council and municipal affairs had the following information noted:

Page number, line up, summary of the story, the bulletin, number of sources quoted, names of sources and the organizational affiliation, the news agency and the geographical source of the story. The information was entered into a logging form and then a media-monitoring database from which data is extracted.

A story fell within the scope of the research if it covered the following issues:

1. City council events and statements
2. Residents’ issues and their relations with the local government structures
3. Letters to the editor or opinions commending or condemning council activities, issues and events.
4. Opinions identifying issues to do with the activities of the council and residents
5. City/ town relations with other cities within or outside Zimbabwe
6. Peri-urban farm invasions and urban agriculture.

Stories were divided into codes developed with university students who assisted in the data compilation.

Sources of information were also categorized according to the role played in local government issues.

Conclusion and recommendations
This research has explored the print media’s coverage of residents’ issues in the municipal affairs of Zimbabwe’s two biggest cities; Harare and Bulawayo.

While municipal issues appeared regularly in the print media, the result of this work has exposed a woeful lack of in-depth coverage of the governance of the two cities. It would also appear that the activities of the two main residents’ associations (CHRA and BURA) are either irregularly covered or that the associations themselves are not as active as they should be in challenging the plethora of civic problems plaguing the management of the two cities.

Without being able to access the number of public statements issued by the two associations, it has been impossible to assess how well the print media have responded to issues raised by the associations.

However, it is clear that the Press has relied heavily on these associations and on unnamed sources within the councils when covering municipal issues.

Such reliance clearly suggests a serious lack of transparency in the governance of the two cities that urgently needs to be addressed by activist campaigns by civic organizations, especially residents’ associations, with the active support of the formal media. Community groups could also enlist non-formal media methods, such as the publication and wide distribution of pamphlets relating to specific civic problems, to break down the pervasive lack of openness in local government.

One of the main responsibilities of the formal media is to act as a watchdog on the performance of public institutions. But in this respect, it has manifestly failed to provide the public with a clear record of the details of how the two cities are being governed.

Most stories have concentrated on national government issues relating to local government, for example, the issue of council elections and government’s manipulation of the laws to its political advantage. While this is, indeed, a most important issue, details relating to the day-to-day management of the two cities have been few and far between, and when they have been raised, they have barely scratched the surface. An example of this has been the coverage of the lack of audited accounts from the City of Harare. The failure of the city’s commissioners to provide this most fundamentally important piece of public information has been widely reported. But demands from the Press – and the public – for the commissioners to make public the details of their spending has not appeared to be a priority. Nor has there been much investigation into this failure, or even the spending policies of the two municipalities. Both of these issues should be essential public information and in themselves affect all other areas of local governance.

Thus, details about the state of housing, health, capital developments, water supply and sewage disposal, population planning and controlled development, among a host of other issues that should be in the public domain, have barely been tackled by the Press during the three months of this research.

With the advent of commissioners running Harare, regular public meetings have not apparently taken place. But even in Bulawayo, the activities of the City Council do not regularly appear in the Press.

While this failure, to a large but immeasurable extent, can be blamed on the culture of secrecy that pervades local government (as it does national government), the media generally, and the Press in particular, have also failed to investigate municipal affairs on a regular basis or at any great depth.

It is impossible for MMPZ to explain this failure, but it is likely that, in addition to a certain lack of resources (and a reluctance by the state media to investigate irregularities in local government), there is a pervasive ignorance of the mechanics of local government and of the importance of councils’ decisions on the communities they run. For even council resolutions made during meetings that are open to the public are not regularly covered.

It would be MMPZ’s recommendation that newspapers regularly devote space to municipal activities and appoint municipal reporters whose responsibility it is to cover the activities of local government institutions and develop strong and reliable contacts with councilors and those professionals running them in the hope that this will improve their penetration of the secrecy that shrouds their operations. It would also be important that such journalists become fully acquainted with the regulations and protocols surrounding local government – and the rights the public have to know what their councils are doing with ratepayers’ money. It would be as well that residents’ associations do the same.

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