The History and Political Transition of Zimbabwe by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030477332
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

25See Human Rights Watch, 6 September 2016.

Part III

Social Media, Democracy and Political Discourse

© The Author(s) 2020

S. J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, P. Ruhanya (eds.)The History and Political Transition of ZimbabweAfrican Histories and Modernitieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47733-2_9

9. The Media and Politics in the Context of the “Third Chimurenga” in Zimbabwe

Philip Pasirayi1

(1)Centre for Community Development in Zimbabwe, Harare, Zimbabwe

This chapter explores the Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front (ZANU–PF) media strategies during the “Third Chimurenga” in the early 2000s. The media was central in the ruling party’s violent seizure of white-owned farms starting from 2000. In the state media, this controversial exercise was justified as the “Third Chimurenga”, meaning the third and decisive phase of the war against colonial rule during which land was a central grievance. I explore how the party’s media strategy under the newly created Department of Information and Publicity was re-geared in line with the party’s hegemonic ambitions and hybrid politics. I discuss how Jonathan Moyo, the newly appointed Minister of State for Information and Publicity, managed to manipulate journalists from the state press through meetings, money, threats to jobs, and creating and disseminating content via routine briefings, which resulted in a committed, self-policing journalistic team and a pliant state press. I conducted interviews with selected journalists and editors from the state press to discuss media briefings that were held by the Department of Information and the framing of the land issue in the state press. The land issue was the primary theme of the “Third Chimurenga”. I show how Moyo established a hardworking and hands-on style of management, and considered history and culture to be an important part of what he was addressing. This chapter contributes to a Zimbabweanist literature on the media and political science literature in what are known as hybrid regimes, where the media plays a central part in regime legitimation and/or survival.

Although ZANU–PF’s interference in the operations of the state media started in the 1980s and 1990s, the new measures that were introduced by the Ministry of Information and Publicity in 2000 under Moyo were designed to entrench the party’s control over the state media in new ways. While Chiumbu and Moyo (2009) acknowledge ZANU–PF’s media strategies, such as institutional re-gearing, the use of incentives and the cultivation of loyalty to control public media, they do not provide details of how this was achieved. I build on this and other works, and my interviews with state and party elites and journalists, to interrogate the relationships between state and party elites and journalists, the political and ideological means of political control focusing on institutional arrangements, media briefings that were conducted by the Ministry of Information and Publicity with journalists and editors, amounted to political re-education about what constituted the national interest, and the payment of money to a cabal of journalists that was assigned to do clandestine media work in support of the regime.

This chapter draws on Zimbabwean state media policies and practices to give insight into the workings of the media in what I argue should be seen or conceptualised as a hybrid regime.

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