Back to Index

Economic decline
Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe (MMPZ)
Extracted from Weekly Media Update 2008-4
Monday January 28th – Sunday February 3rd 2008

The government media did nothing to enlighten the nation about the country’s evident plague of economic problems although they devoted 112 piecemeal stories to the topic: ZBC [24] and official papers [88]. This was illustrated by their absurdly reluctant coverage of the Reserve Bank’s monetary policy statement. The official papers restricted themselves to reproducing the statement as a supplement rather than interpreting its contents (The Herald and Chronicle 2/2), while ZBC suppressed it. For example, ZTV (1/2, 8pm) only reported it in the context of the Zimbabwe National Chamber of Commerce president, Marah Hativagone, saying "effective stakeholder participation and commitment" was key to the "success of the current turn-around initiatives".

Consequently, there was a blackout on any analysis of the Bank’s plans to tackle Zimbabwe’s myriad economic problems, among them hyperinflation, dwindling production and decaying infrastructure.

The official media did not even query the secrecy surrounding the announcement of the statement, with The Herald and Chronicle (2/2) passively quoting RBZ governor Gideon Gono vaguely arguing that his statement was issued without the usual fanfare "for strategic reasons while we prepare for a comprehensive post-election policy programme". No effort was made to investigate why such an urgent issue should be sidelined by an election – or indeed, why it shouldn’t have been used as a campaign platform for the ruling party. In fact, The Herald (1/2) only reported that the cheque limit had been raised to $10 billion but did not, for example, query where government had "mobilised" US$142 million for food imports nor notice the backdoor devaluation of the Zimbabwe dollar by increasing the gold support price at $6m to US$1. The same passive coverage characterised the government media’s coverage of other indicators of decline.

The failure by the official media to provide analysis of the economic crisis mainly stemmed from its over-reliance on official statements as exemplified by the government papers’ sourcing pattern. (See Fig 1).

Fig 1: Voice distribution in the government Press

The private papers provided a better insight of the economic decline, highlighting Gono’s salient points on the economy. For example, The Zimbabwe Independent (1/2) highlighted Gono’s revelation that the economy had contracted by a further six percent and interpreted his criticism of the Central Statistics Office’s failure to release inflation figures, saying this had resulted in "distorted guesses" in the market, as an indirect attack on Finance Minister Samuel Mumbengegwi, who has prohibited the CSO from releasing the figures since last September. The paper also made a comparative analysis of Mumbengegwi’s positive forecasts for the economy and Gono’s statistics revealing a decline in production across all sectors. All the private media updated their readers on the latest national power outage, deepening labour discontent, the continued banking crisis, water cuts and the deteriorating services in hospitals among others. The critical manner in which the private Press handled the topic is mirrored by their wide use of alternative opinion to question government policies (Fig 2 and 3).

Fig 2: Voice distribution in the private electronic media

Fig 6: Voice distribution in the private papers

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