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Election Watch Issue 10 - 2012
The Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe
October 12, 2012
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Media
take PM to task over 'colourful' love life
A legal battle
between the Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai and his estranged lover
Locardia Karimatsenga, gifted the media a feast of salacious news
to feed on during the month of September. They all lived up to the
gift.
On September
8th, a day after Karimatsenga filed a US$15,000 monthly maintenance
claim against Tsvangirai in the Harare civil court, she made an
urgent High Court application seeking to prevent the Prime Minister
from marrying his present fiancée, Elizabeth Macheka, a ceremony
set for the following Saturday.
These court
applications sparked a media frenzy, with newspapers plastering
their front pages with sensational headlines reflecting their own
perspectives on the events: "Tsvangirai wedding war"
(NewsDay, 8/9), "Plot against PM intensifies" (Daily
News, 8/9), "PM ex-lover humiliated" (NewsDay, 13/9),
and "Locardia outshines Tsvangirai in court again" (The
Herald 28/9).
While the private
media agreed that Tsvangirai's public fallout with Karimatsenga
and his alleged bed-hopping had damaged his reputation, in addition
to causing serious divisions in his party; the state media pounced
on the scandal, attempting to discredit the Prime Minister and his
party by suggesting this was evidence that he was unfit to govern
ahead of national elections.
This was reflected
in 52 (85%) of the 61 reports the state media carried on the topic.
The remaining
nine were straightforward reports on court proceedings.
The Herald (15/9)
even ran a front-page comment: Can anyone trust Tsvangirai with
Zim? Celebrating the cancellation of Tsvangirai's wedding
licence by Harare provincial magistrate Munamato Mutevedzi, a day
before the proposed wedding, and the dismissal by the High Court
of the PM's urgent chamber application to suspend the lower
court's ruling, the paper gloated over the Prime Minister's
predicament: "The groom was rightly hoist by his own petard
in circumstances that call into question his suitability for the
highest office in the land. So grave have been his errors of judgment,
and failure to handle personal affairs that probably only his mother
can still repose faith in his ability to be Head of State and Government
and Commander-in-Chief of our defence forces".
In another article,
(17/9) the paper published an opinion piece by former ZBC newsreader
Gilbert Nyambabvu, declaring: "To be fair . . . Tsvangirai
did well to become head of the country's largest union body,
but to seek to propel him beyond that achievement is to promote
the man beyond his capabilities and appropriate station in life".
While the state
media sympathized with Locardia and other women who were allegedly
ditched by Tsvangirai, the Daily News prominently reported the PM's
dismissal of these court cases as a grand project by ZANU PF and
the CIO to tarnish his image, without questioning the truth of such
claims, or how he had contributed to such a dilemma in the first
place.
But most of
the private media blamed Tsvangirai for mishandling his private
affairs in most of their 35 reports.
The Zimbabwe
Independent (14/9), for instance, argued that while Zimbabwe's
state security agents might have been involved in some of the scandals,
this argument was "not sustainable", as it "wholly
ignores the issue of Tsvangirai's character and judgement".
The weekly's
Muckracker column dismissed attempts to exonerate Tsvangirai on
the grounds of alleged CIO involvement: "Whether the accusations
are true or not Tsvangirai's conduct has been less than exemplary".
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