adminMarshall McLuhan’s famous coinage that “the media is the message” is one of the greatest truisms in reading and understanding the media and its presentation of man and product.
It explains how men seek to project themselves through communication technologies.
The technologies thus became extensions of men, like, an example given by one source, a car became an extension of man.
One Todd Kappelman explains that McLuhan was projecting a “world of people who worship the objects of their own invention”.
But this is a banal point to make to all those that are familiar with the media here and anywhere else.
When buying a newspaper you get what exactly you expect, with little or no surprises.
That is, whether you like it or not.
It is for the precise reason why The Herald, for example, will always be The Herald — all things equal — while any other media outfit in the country will likely carry the baggage of its editorial identity for as long as they live.
And our polarised society makes the identities more pronounced, more profound.
Those who try to occupy the middle ground — some undefined space of fluidity and neutrality — find themselves unable to live, to sustain life.
They die.
Zimbabweans have come to expect the polarities or the binaries and perpetuate and water them.
But therein lies the irony.
The very media that people create and worship ends up manipulating the people themselves!
This in fact was what led McLuhan to, it is reported, usually play pun on the words “message” and “massage” and “mess age”.
But the most powerful idea coming from this is that of media “massaging”.
Is factionalism bigger than the party?
The original intent of the piece was to highlight the curious extent to which squabbles, real or imagined, within the ruling zanu-pf party had assumed a status of being bigger than the party.
See, after the climax last December where we saw the purge of the putschist cabal led by Joice Mujuru, we thought we would have a kind of resolution to the factionalism story leading to stability and ultimately focus by the party on delivering what it was elected to in 2013.
Alas, it would seem factionalism did not die in December, after all.
It may have just morphed; mutated.
The current talk in the body politic, although to a significant extent exaggerated, is evidence of the birth of a new strain of factionalism in the revolutionary party.
The enemies of the revolutionary party are rubbing their hands in glee and are waiting for their glorious moment.
Those enemies of the party include one moron called Rugare Gumbo who is praying for a self-fulfilling prophesy of the demise of the party from which he was booted out because of his putschist tendencies he has carried into old age from those days in the late 1970s.
There in fact have been regrets in some quarters that the opposition has not taken advantage of the squabbles within the ruling party to deliver a decisive blow.
But that is too much to expect from our good Morgan Tsvangirai and company, isn’t it?
zanu-pf does not have better friends than the opposition.
Man they call Tyson
Cde Saviour Kasukuwere is the man President Mugabe appointed to be the Secretary for the Commissariat at the last Congress in December.
He is your opposite number of Organising Secretary in other establishments.
Occupying high echelons of the party (some like to call it Number Six in the party hierarchy), he has a huge chunk to do in this brief of organising the party.
These include supervising activities of party organs at provincial, district and branch levels, keeping records of membership, formulating strategies for the party’s political programme and to be the chairman of the Political and Policy Committee of the Central Committee.
Other critical functions of the PC are to organise, supervise and conduct elections at all levels of the party and to establish, maintain and administer party schools, colleges and training institutions for the party.
This is what the party’s constitution says.
A couple of months into his tenure, one could say that except for the very last duty as outlined above, this was what the man from Mt Darwin has been attempting to do, a very taxing duty in against the backdrop of fractious politics of yesteryear.
But Tyson, it would seem, has fallen into a vicious web of intrigue and power politics.
The current flashpoints in zanu-pf from Harare East to Marondera/Mashonaland East are a test of character for Kasukuwere.
Ordinarily, following the fall of the other faction, reconstituting and reconstructing the party and indeed conducting elections “at all levels” of the party should not have been such a difficult, divisive thing in a disciplined revolutionary party. But it is not.
Kasukuwere is now being accused of all kinds of evil that range from undermining the authority of Vice Presidents to seeking to become the President of the Republic himself.
And, oh, by the way, the name of the First Lady has also been dragged into this.
The massage
But how should we read into all this?
McLuhan’s truism of media being the message — and the media massaging the message — comes in handy.
How else can we explain a story as celebratory as this one that appeared in one daily that talked of “Tyson on the ropes”?
Another one told us that Kasukuwere was a “Dead man walking”.
He is having a “political fight of his life”, we are told.
One of the ‘’crimes’’ Kasukuwere stands accused of is working with the UK and US to undermine President Mugabe (who appointed him just five months ago).
Could it get worse than that?
But one knows something is wrong the moment we see one Rugare salivating at the prospect of bad news to cadres like Kasukuwere or even worse the ultimate fall of the whole zanu-pf edifice.
Here is our Rugare conveniently and opportunistically commenting:
“What is happening in zanu-pf vindicates us…We never did anything to destroy zanu-pf. If anything, we wanted the party to be strong.
“In fact, people like (Information, Media and Broadcasting Services minister) Jonathan Moyo are basking in glory because they have achieved what they wanted, that is to see zanu-pf dead.”
And hear, hear Pedzisai Ruhanya a “political analyst” telling us that, “The problem with Kasukuwere and his group is that they don’t understand or appreciate how zanu-pf functions…”!
The most obvious question is, why does the prospect of trouble for Kasukuwere so please the opposition including new additions to that opposition front in the form of expelled former zanu-pf members?
For us, there is only one rule to reading and understanding the media: if something gives endless arousal to the opposition and its media then it’s something to run away from!
Online Reporter