Back to Index

This article participates on the following special index pages:

Electoral issues
Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe (MMPZ)
Extracted from Weekly Media Update 2008-3
Monday January 21st - Sunday January 27th 2008

The government media’s coverage of the harmonised council, general and presidential elections that President Mugabe has announced will be held on March 29, remained gravely uninformative. Almost all their 80 reports on the matter (ZBC [32] and government papers [48]) failed to provide information on important aspects of the elections, such as the authorities’ readiness to stage them, the transparency and fairness of the electoral procedures and how the parties and the public will be affected by them. Only the private media attempted to address these issues in 66 reports: private electronic (48) and Print (18).

a) Political Rallies
The government media continued to deprive the electorate access to the views of all competing parties through inequitable coverage of the contestants’ activities. They gave heavily favourable coverage to ZANU PF and paid scant attention to the preparations of its opponents, especially the Morgan Tsvangirai-led MDC, which they portrayed in negative light. This was reflected in 73 reports they published on the parties’ campaigns, 25 of which were aired on ZBC and 48 in the official papers. For example, of ZBC’s 25 monitored stories on the parties’ campaigns, 24 were on the electoral preparations of the ruling party and only one on MDC activities. None were on other opposition parties. Although the government papers gave the appearance of some balance, covering ZANU PF activities in 24 stories, MDC (12) and alternative opposition [seven]), none of their stories gave even a neutral perspective of the MDC.

This unprofessional stance was epitomised by the official media’s prejudiced coverage of the MDC’s banned "Freedom March". They neither fairly informed their readers on the objectives of the march nor critically assessed the credibility of the police’s reasons for banning it despite initially giving it the go-ahead. Radio Zimbabwe (21/1,1pm), ZTV (21/1,6pm) and The Herald and Chronicle (22/1) simply quoted police spokesperson Wayne Bvudzijena saying they had barred the MDC march because they feared it "might cause mayhem" after "some exasperating statements" from its leadership, particularly Tsvangirai.

Exactly how the MDC leader’s comments about the delimitation process being "a fraud"; and that his party was "opposed to the polls…(and) wanted a new constitution, voters’ roll and an independent electoral commission" were likely to cause violence, as alleged by Bvudzijena, were never pursued.

The following day, The Herald’s political editor Caesar Zvayi amplified the police justification for the ban, arguing that the MDC, which has "a culture of violence", had "no cause to grandstand in the streets" when "all (its) grievances fall under the purview of the SADC-mediated dialogue" with ZANU PF. No comment from the MDC was sought. The private media did not discriminate against the MDC. They accorded space to both ZANU PF and opposition parties’ preparations for the polls. They provided their audiences with informed reportage on the MDC march, its objectives, the hypocritical nature of the police ban, and its impact on the success of the SADC-mediated dialogue.

For example, ZimOnline and The Financial Gazette (24/1), reported Tsvangirai saying the police ban and the subsequent crackdown on MDC supporters demonstrated that Mugabe had "failed the test on whether or not he was ready to tolerate opposition, or to allow the forthcoming polls to be held under the SADC guidelines on the conducting of free and fair elections". The Zimbabwe Independent (25/1) made similar observations. The paper’s Muckraker column questioned the credibility of the reasons the police gave for banning the march, saying it exposed their "glaring double standards" as just two months ago "they allowed a ZANU PF march to go through the city centre with banners and placards". Besides, it also argued that the ban rendered amendments to POSA "pointless".

b) Administration
The government media did not question the feasibility of staging the elections on March 29 with the nomination of candidates on February 8 in view of the radical changes to the nature and number of parliamentary, senatorial and ward constituencies, which had barely been made public. This was just one among a number of unresolved controversies still dogging the election preparations. Neither did they question the viability of conducting the four elections in a day when previous polls have shown this to be an impractical exercise. The Herald (26/1), which carried the presidential proclamation, ignored opposition and civic society concerns over the practicable ability to effectively fulfil the electoral requirements by simply declaring that the polls "will be held in accordance with the SADC principles and guidelines governing democratic elections" without even mentioning what these were. It also gave an entirely false impression of the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC)’s "final" delimitation report by restricting its coverage to a ZANU Ndonga official endorsing it as "a job well done".

The Sunday Mail (27/1) also suppressed national concerns over whether credible elections could be arranged in the time-frame announced by Mugabe by claiming that "all but one of Zimbabwe’s major political parties have confirmed their participation in the polls". It reported that the Arthur Mutambara-led MDC had said "it was ready for the polls" leaving the Tsvangirai faction as "the only major player still to pronounce itself on the election". By comparison, the private media reported widespread doubts by opposition parties and local and regional civic bodies that the country was ready for the March 29 plebiscite. For example, The Standard (27/1) reported Welshman Ncube, secretary-general of the Mutambara-led MDC criticising Mugabe as having "repudiated" the SADC dialogue by "unilaterally" announcing the election date.

ZimOnline (24/1) and The Standard cited the African Commission on Human and People’s Rights (ACHPR) and the local election watchdog, the Zimbabwe Election Support Network (ZESN), expressing reservations over the electoral process.

ZimOnline quoted ZESN saying the country was not ready for the plebiscite, citing "little time for ZEC to work on a credible voters’ roll and for the public to analyse the delimitation report".

c) Political Violence
The government media ignored incidents of politically motivated violence, rights abuses and electoral malpractices committed by state security agents and ruling party activists, mainly against opposition supporters. For example, while these media reported the assault of youths at an MDC rally in Highfield (The Herald 21/1), they did not view the arrest of 15 MDC supporters and officials during the party’s banned march (The Herald 24/1) as a rights violation. Otherwise, The Herald and Chronicle (24/1) and ZTV (24/1, 6pm) passively reported government dismissing the arrest of Tsvangirai at 4am on the day of his party’s planned march as a "blatant lie". They quoted police spokesman Wayne Bvudzijena saying the police had merely "invited" Tsvangirai and two other MDC officials for "a meeting early yesterday morning to clarify statements made by opposition officials threatening to engage in riots worse than those in Kenya".

The rationale of "inviting" the MDC leader to a pre-dawn meeting was never questioned. Neither did these media seek comment from the MDC.

Only the private media accurately reported Tsvangirai’s arrest and the violent manner in which the police arrested 15 MDC activists walking from the city centre to Glamis Sports Arena to attend the party’s court-sanctioned rally. These incidents formed part of the five cases of human rights abuses against opposition activists carried in the private media in the week. The different manner in which the government and private media handled the topic is reflected in the sampled sourcing patterns of ZBC and the private electronic media as shown in Figs 1 and 2.

Fig 1: Voice distribution on ZBC

Fig 2: Voice distribution in the private media

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