There is a method to the fine madness

Joram Nyathi Spectrum

Zanu-PF is better advised to gauge properly the monster driving the attacks against it, that it is more than a matter of recklessness by journalists but a war for the soul of the nation. Nothing should be taken for granted because nothing is guaranteed.

The temptation is very great and the provocations too rude, sometimes. But Zanu-PF should resist the temptation to use the power at its disposal, and instead ignore the provocations for their pettiness. They say if you fight a pig in the mud, it will definitely beat you from experience.

The private media have lately been on a warpath against Zanu-PF. Yet the war is deliberately focused on matters which should be peripheral, that is if there are really internal factional fights in Zanu-PF. The real war Zimbabwe currently is fighting is an economic one, but the private media have made it their vocation to drag the ruling party to the mud of factional politics where it can never win because it’s a matter of whatever theory one wants to weave for publication on any day. It’s a fight in the mud.

Now even what used to be considered serious publications have jumped into the mud to pursue provocative political jibes around factional fights and succession wars while positive investment news in tourism, new power projects by the Russians and Chinese and lately by the Dangote Group, the bread and butter issues, are hidden in the inner pages and internal party matters assume pride of place.

Zanu-PF has obliged by reacting angrily to its dirty linen being washed in the public. The party has threatened to invoke the law if not enact new ones to deal with this nuisance. While President Mugabe recently dismissed these attacks as jibes belonging to the dustbin, the party’s secretary for Information and Publicity Simon Khaya Moyo came out in the media yesterday sounding less charitable, warning grimly; “Unless this malignant mischief stops, these misguided elements will carry the cross. Enough is enough.”

That is the grist these media need to buttress their claims that there is no democracy in Zimbabwe, that there is no freedom of expression and to lobby for more foreign funding in the name of fighting a red-toothed dictatorship. That is where Zanu-PF needs to tread carefully. It should avoid creating martyrs out of institutions or organisations which crave that status because they have nothing more of substance to contribute to the national discourse.

The point is this: martyrdom is a sacrifice for a worthy cause or belief, not a trophy to deliberately strive for. In threatening to deal with errant private media for their provocations, Zanu-PF runs a credibility risk: it can either trivialise a serious media aberration by failing to carry out its threats, or create martyrs out of gross ethical deviance by seeking to honour its word.

There is no doubt the media the ruling party is threatening, by reacting to this with intensified jibes, are happy to call Zanu-PF’s bluff because they have a bigger agenda, far bigger than just exposing divisions in the ruling party. It is an agenda which goes to the root of why we are so polarised as a nation, and why divisions in the ruling party are such a happy omen for those who want the party dead. The media Zanu-PF threatens are hapless whelps barking for their supper. (It’s honourable to sing for your supper if the master is foreign.)

The eager attacks are not entirely without a basis. Like all previous ones, Zanu-PF’s electoral victory in 2013 provoked a lot of anger. The opposition was devastated to paralysis by that blow.

Then last year’s December’s Zanu-PF congress came with enormous opportunities for those who have always fought to neutralise and destroy liberation movements in the region. Internal purges in Zanu-PF before and after congress yielded cadres with liberation war credentials who could be camouflaged and projected as the true carriers of the values and aspirations of heroes who include the likes of Josiah Tongogara, Herbert Chitepo, Joshua Nkomo and Joseph Msika, but now without a burning desire for land restoration and black economic empowerment; only job opportunities within a white enclave economy.

Give it to them: there is a perception that Zanu-PF is at the moment at its weakest point. Its enemies can read that without glasses, hence the relentless attacks to give material form to that perception. People First is supposed to be the alternative corporeal form which confirms the death of the “hardline” Zanu-PF.

But the attacks also reveal a lot of anxiety. There are still saving graces for Zanu-PF: the opposition as we have known it is literally dead and buried, Zanu-PF is going to conference in December where it is likely to come out reinvigorated, and elections are still nearly three years away to give Zanu-PF enough time to reorganise itself. So why not finish it off at the point of its greatest vulnerability!

At such a time even the most stolid will lose their cool, resort to temper and damn the consequences. The temptation is huge when you have all police power at your disposal. Yet we know that when they raise alarms about the private media in Zimbabwe being under siege, they are not addressing a Zimbabwean audience, which knows better and is nauseated by what they read on a daily basis which does not address serious economic issues. The alarms are raised for the foreign saviours who are desperate for a casus belli with “the regime”.

While motives, the truth and effectiveness may be contested, let us not lose a sense of perspective. The collapse of journalistic standards in Zimbabwe goes beyond training and media ownership. It’s salutary that a consensus is emerging that the collapse of ethical reporting came with the protest politics of the MDC in the late 1990s which itself coincided with the cooling off in the liberation war ethos.

The vacuum thus created was quickly filled by charlatans calling themselves our liberators — the foreign-sponsored human rights and democracy lobby — whose raison d’etre in effect was to fight for and protect the landed interests of those against whom the liberation war was waged.

That is where the polarisation in the media took shape and journalists found themselves embedded with political parties/causes. You could not be a serious reporter or writer and remain neutral. In the event, a choice had to be made between the revolution and the status quo ante 2000. The dichotomy became like a latter-day Berlin wall.

So it was that the nation got so divided between those defending the dominant white economy and those who felt that the revolution was being aborted before its mission was accomplished. You were either for us or against us. If you were on the other side of the fence, it didn’t matter what epithet I used to describe you. Your point of view did not matter to balance the story.

Pursuant to that template, to this day some journalists spend their time engaged in what one can only describe as divination and mind reading of their targets on the other side of the political divide. There are omniscient, ubiquitous “sources” who have all the answers to what is happening in the other political camps.

In this war of attrition, it has become virtually impossible to construct a shared vision of the Zimbabwe we want. The national Constitution only matters in defence of neoliberal human rights but never about the values of the liberation struggle. We practise our craft in an environment where history as a guide to the future no longer matters.

Seen in that light, Zanu-PF is better advised to gauge properly the monster driving the attacks against it, that it is more than a matter of recklessness by journalists but a war for the soul of the nation. Nothing should be taken for granted because nothing is guaranteed. Liberation of the African mind is far from over.