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Without a substantive campaign message going into all seven elections Zimbabwe has had since 2000, MDC-T has tried to form a negative one centred on President Mugabe’s advanced age and purported ill-health.Morgan Tsvangirai and his MDC-T lieutenants, their western handlers and their captive media always went hysterical on those two points in a bid to portray the President as unfit to govern, therefore undeserving of being voted for.
Tsvangirai himself led that negative campaign. In January 2012 while responding to Zanu-PF’s push for elections, he said, “President Mugabe’s health is definitely a serious worry to Zanu-PF. He is an old man, he is not getting any younger and I think age is beginning to tell. . . . his health is telling, his body is frail.”
Early July last year, Tsvangirai told his supporters at Neuso in Mhondoro, “I cannot avoid talking about (President) Mugabe’s age. It is a serious national issue. The old man needs to rest because at 90 years he should be enjoying his pension. We can’t trust a 90-year-old to run this country for another five years.”
The private media made screaming headlines out of these personal attacks. Tsvangirai, who was meant to benefit electorally from this, was happy.
Needless to say the electorate didn’t share his views. Instead of sending President Mugabe into retirement, voters gave him a fresh, huge five-year mandate and sent Tsvangirai himself into early, penniless retirement.
Having campaigned on the health of his main opponent and encouraging common attention to it, Tsvangirai is taking his own medicine now, administered, not by the man he wished ill for, but from a probing local media. Reports said Tsvangirai was taken ill at the weekend. Officially, he was hospitalised for “exhaustion” but the media speculated that his ailment was graver and terminal. The illness prevented him from addressing two rallies in recent weeks.
Initially, his spokesman Luke Tamborinyoka denied his boss was sick, but later admitted that he was admitted at the Trauma Centre in Harare.
Tsvangirai did not help matters on Wednesday when he allegedly failed to pay his medical bill at the top health facility. He then fled through the backdoor without paying.
This was big news and the media correctly published items on his illness, his admission into hospital, failure to settle his bill and his escape through an undesignated exit.
Tamborinyoka’s handling of the events made an already bad situation worse. A journalist by training, who must know better, reduced himself to a laughing stock, frothing at the mouth to attack and threaten news outlets and specific journalists he named, asking why they took so much interest in his boss’ illness and his failure to pay.
It is deplorable when leaders of a party that markets itself as an advocate for media pluralism, go about conducting themselves in a manner that seeks to overthrow that pluralism.
In addition to attacking journalists, Tamborinyoka also went after hospital staff whom he alleged connived with police and journalists to wait on Tsvangirai at the facility.
He is threatening legal action from Tsvangirai against the Herald and ZBC for covering the story the way they did. Tsvangirai, like everyone else, reserves that right, but for him, through his spokesman to try to suppress tough reportage, the sort of reportage that he actually sponsors or encourages when it targets his political opponents, is rank hypocrisy.
“We wish,” said Tamborinyoka, “to set the record straight for the benefit of millions of Zimbabweans who have been at the mercy of some yellow journalism from The Herald, the ZBC and other sections of the press over the last few days. Zimbabweans woke up to the news that president Tsvangirai has fled a medical institution without paying his bills. President Tsvangirai has spoken to his lawyer about the malicious reports.”
He and the man he speaks for, is not used to responding to hard questions about issues of public interest. Yet their peers in other parties have gotten used to answering similar, or worse, questions without frothing at their mouths or threatening legal or other unspecified action on anyone. It is normal for the media to, from time to time, chase stories the way our sister paper and ZBC did.
MDC-T cannot intimidate anyone, so have to accept and expect more of that dogged media spotlight on, not only their leader at a personal level, but issues in that party as well as long as they are of public interest. Any expectations to the contrary would be hypocritical and unacceptable.
Online Reporter