The Sunday Mail
Information, Media and Broadcasting Services Deputy Minister Supa Mandiwanzira told Parliament last week that Zimbabwe would soon have several independent TV stations. This revelation comes hardly a month after the Broadcasting Authority of Zimbabwe announced that 18 applicants had been shortlisted as candidates to be issued with commercial radio licences.
BAZ chief executive officer Obert Muganyuri said the applicants would be subjected to public hearings to determine their suitability. The licensing process should be completed by the end of July this year, he said.
On any day one is likely to read at least five Zimbabweans daily newspapers, listen to six radio stations and television. Add to this mass a number of online publications, Facebook, Whatsapp and Twitter and one begins to encounter a lot of atmospherics.
This should be good for a plural media in the country. We are probably moving faster than the United States. But don’t we risk putting the cart before the horse?
Some background.
Back in 1999 when the newly-formed MDC had the seductive allure of a virgin, the Zanu-PF Government proposed a new constitution for the country to replace the transitional Lancaster House document. One of the key clauses of that constitution was to set presidential term limits; another sought to authorise Government to expropriate land occupied by predominantly white farmers without paying compensation.
The MDC ganged up with whites protesting that the proposed constitution left President Mugabe with too much power and that in any case he should not be allowed to contest having already served in that executive capacity since 1987 (I don’t know how they knew he was going to win the next elections) and that taking land from whites without compensation was illegal.
They mounted a vigorous campaign to have the draft constitution rejected in 2000.
History shall forever record that their efforts paid off: they won the vote. They, however, lost the cause.
Today Zanu-PF is back to its dominant position, President Mugabe is still head of state and there is no hope in heaven that those farmers who were removed from commercial farms will get them back even under an MDC government.
The point about this background is that we failed to agree on a new constitution because we were too polarised politically. We did not have a shared vision, even among ourselves as blacks. While some dreamt of a fantasy democracy as farm labourers, others saw on the horizon a democracy anchored in the ownership of the country’s resources, primarily land.
An attempt to fashion a shared vision for Zimbabwe was made later, culminating in a draft document called “The Zimbabwe We Want” around 2007. This was a discussion document which sought to narrow the polarisation in the country. It gave all Zimbabweans – churches, civic society organisations, the diaspora, students, academia and political parties – a chance to sketch a vision of a Zimbabwe they would want to live in. That aborted search became, in hindsight, the precursor to the new Constitution of Zimbabwe adopted last year.
But back then it suffered the fate of the draft constitution of 2000. It was debated as if it were a party manifesto rather a rough draft of a national vision.
Dr Goodwill Shana of Word of Life International Ministries notes that at the time of drafting “The Zimbabwe We Want” document, Zimbabweans were not “talking to each other; they were talking at each other”.
There was too much politics. People were obsessed with change of national leadership. “Many issues had been personalised to leading political figures as if a mere change of personality would fundamentally change the way we have been doing politics. There was a need for the nation to move away from this preoccupation with individuals and to go and deal with issues that affected all of us,” observes Dr Shana with evident regret.
Because of this misdirected preoccupation with personalities, discussion of “The Zimbabwe We Want” document potentially left Zimbabweans more divided and blinder. Tensions were boiling over, and turned the synchronised elections the following year in 2008 into a dogfight.
Our media was not an unwilling participant in the political jihad; it was ardent in stoking the tensions to make sure no wound ever healed. Where a wound was seen to be healing, the media dutifully thrust a tong in and added a little salt. The phrase “Zanu-PF and MDC-T are like chalk and cheese” became the acme of journalistic scholarship even as former South African president Thabo Mbeki, a perspicacious pan Africanist and shrewd negotiator, was slowly but astutely steering the mortal foes towards an accommodation that would yield the Global Political Agreement and a Government of National Unity in 2009.
Cyril Ramaphosa, who I believe helped Mbeki in clinching the final deal, told Jomic members in January 2013 in Johannesburg that during the negotiations, it “looked like South Africans wanted peace more than the Zimbabweans themselves”. That’s how bad it was, this marriage of inconvenience, which nevertheless lasted more than four years until the July 2013 harmonised elections.
But the polarisation has continued with greater ardour. We are still unable to find each other even after the hiatus of the inclusive Government and the making of a new Constitution. The media is still largely playing the agitator and that takes us back to the cart and the horse.
That book of wisdom, the Bible, relates a story in the immediate post-lapsarian era when people were still united and spoke one tongue. Lucifer’s mischief was fermenting. Suddenly they decided they wanted to build a tower high enough so they could take a peek at what the mighty God was doing up there in the firmament.
God was not amused. He gave people different tongues and suddenly they could not understand each other. The place became known as Babel, hence the tower of Babel could not be completed.
Zimbabwe faces this dilemma of a lack of shared vision and a desire to speak in many tongues. What should come first in our desire to create that vision, to build our own developmental tower to reach the sky?
As it is there is desperation across the mass media to provide meaningful content to Zimbabweans, hence the lapse in standards and degeneracy into the world of sleaze and sex. One thinks twice everyday whether to take the newspaper home at the end of the day. Dead bodies and naked women are splashed on front pages to attract buyers. We have a market which is oversubscribed and a few publications surviving by the grace of God.
The worst bit is of course that, in desperation to lure buyers, small disagreements are often blown out of proportion. That way some political parties manage to keep themselves relevant, but the nation suffers. The nation is in a perpetual state of uncertainty, a deliberately manufactured “political instability” which is doing more harm to the economy than sanctions.
The parody and distortions around Zim Asset manifest the great communication challenge we face as a country before Babel.
Media plurality is fantastic; so is multi-partyism. Unfortunately when these institutions multiply in a badly polarised nation which lacks a shared vision, they become not only a disservice to the people but dangerous to national progress. Worse when they open space for foreign interference through external funding for them to survive.
We need to get our priorities right. To strike a fair balance between media plurality and how it can be harnessed to serve a broader national cause, not leave it exposed to abuse.
Could this be a call to another dialogue on the Zimbabwe we want, a dialogue obviously not spearheaded by political parties, especially given their partisan and divisive nature?
The need for a shared national vision has never been greater, especially under our current political circumstances where even the “national interest” is said to be contested territory.
