|
Back to Index
The
state of Zimbabwe's economy on the road to recovery
Media
Monitoring Project Zimbabwe
Extracted
from Weekly Media Update 2004-45
Monday November 7th – Sunday November 14th
2004
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".
Visit the MMPZ
fact sheet
Please credit www.kubatana.net if you make use of material from this website.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License unless stated otherwise.
TOP
|
