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Economic decline
Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe (MMPZ)
Extracted from Weekly Media Update 2008-1
Monday January 7th - Sunday January 16th, 2008
January 17, 2008

The government media carried a record number of stories highlighting the country's economic distress but this failed to translate into informed coverage of the topic in the 99 reports they carried. Of these, 43 appeared on ZBC and 56 in government papers. The reports either censored stories that exposed the extent of the infrastructural and economic decline or gave piecemeal presentations that obscured government's culpability. As a result, there was no holistic audit of the disastrous effects of these problems, such as cash, water and power shortages, and the galloping cost of living, on industry and households. Neither did they examine the root causes of the difficulties or task government to explain the measures it was taking to arrest the crisis.

For example, these media largely turned a blind eye to the water and power shortages in the country. And when they reported them, they were grossly inadequate. For example, rather than pin down the authorities to coherently explain on the water shortages and their capacity to address it, ZTV (7/1,8pm) merely announced that the Zimbabwe National Water Authority (ZINWA) would "continue to ration water as it is facing challenges in sourcing water treatment chemicals . . . facing difficulties in accessing foreign currency . . . " Equally, there was no attempt to quiz government on how it would tackle the acute shortages of local and foreign currencies and the extent to which their scarcity had crippled the economy.

Instead, they simply amplified official rhetoric criminalizing the business sector and "cash barons" for the country's economic woes without relating it to government policies. For example, while the official media carried several festive season reports that celebrated the arrest of alleged cash barons for causing cash shortages in the formal market, they failed to investigate this development following court revelations exposing the RBZ as the chief financier of some companies involved in black market deals, among them Dande Holdings, owned partly by fugitive ZANU PF MP for Guruve North David Butau.

The Herald (5/1), for example, passively reported prosecutor Tawanda Zvekare accusing the RBZ - during the trial of Joseph Manjoro of Flatwater Investments on illegal foreign currency dealings - of "blindly" splashing "cash ($7 trillion) to the firm without verifying if they were good partners, adding, " . . . what we have now is a grand theft involving the RBZ itself". Instead, Spot FM (13/1,1pm) diverted attention from this matter by passively quoting Information Deputy Minister Bright Matonga describing the cash shortages as "meant to incite people to an uprising". It was also against this background that instead of investigating why the country continued to be dogged by persistent price increases and commodity shortages despite official assurances that government was addressing the problem through the National Incomes and Pricing Commission (NIPC), the official papers unquestioningly welcomed government's extension by six months of the commission's mandate to monitor prices.

The Herald (7/1) celebrated NIPC's threats against businesses accused of "unilaterally" increasing prices, quoting NIPC chairman Godwills Masimirembwa saying they had "finished compiling a list of (businesses) who have been circumventing gazetted prices and handed over their names to the police for prosecution" without assessing the implications. The government media's failure to critically analyse the topic was reflected by its excessive reliance on government comment as exemplified by the official papers' sourcing pattern. See Fig 4.

Fig 4: Voice distribution in the government Press

The private media not only exposed the extent of the economic crisis, but also blamed government for its poor handling. For example, they recorded the cost of the human suffering caused by the water shortage in towns, exposed the futility of government's blitz on businesses and the RBZ's ineffectual efforts to resolve the cash crisis, among others. The Zimbabwe Independent (11/1), for instance, argued that the blitz on business was a "futile" exercise since it had created serious distortions in the market as business struggled to stay afloat and resulted in an influx of imported goods priced at parallel market rates.

Earlier, Studio 7 (4/1) disputed government claims that the cash shortage was due to hoarding. It quoted an unnamed RBZ official arguing that the country needs $700 trillion to "ease" the "cash crisis" yet the money supply is "not far over $100 trillion". The private media's sourcing pattern as illustrated by that of the private electronic media as shown in Fig 5.

Fig 5: Voice distribution in the private electronic media

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