WestminsterResearch http://www.westminster.ac.uk/research/westminsterresearch Alternative media and African democracy: The Daily News and opposition politics in Zimbabwe, 1997-2010. Pedzisai Ruhanya Faculty of Media, Arts and Design This is an electronic version of a PhD thesis awarded by the University of Westminster. © The Author, 2014. This is an exact reproduction of the paper copy held by the University of Westminster library. The WestminsterResearch online digital archive at the University of Westminster aims to make the research output of the University available to a wider audience. Copyright and Moral Rights remain with the authors and/or copyright owners. Users are permitted to download and/or print one copy for non-commercial private study or research. Further distribution and any use of material from within this archive for profit-making enterprises or for commercial gain is strictly forbidden. Whilst further distribution of specific materials from within this archive is forbidden, you may freely distribute the URL of WestminsterResearch: (http://westminsterresearch.wmin.ac.uk/). In case of abuse or copyright appearing without permission e- mail [email protected] Alternative Media and African Democracy: The Daily News and Opposition Politics in Zimbabwe – 1997-2010 PEDZISAI RUHANYA A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Westminster for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy June 2014 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful for the patience and support provided by the members of my supervisory team, Dr Winston Mano and Dr Anthony McNicholas, particularly Dr Winston Mano my Director of Studies. I acknowledge, with deep appreciation, the academic guidance given by the supervisory team. I also thank Dr Pete Goodwin for his feedback and Maria Way for technical help. This dissertation was researched, thought and re-thought, written and rewritten in Zimbabwe and the United Kingdom. Therefore, I owe profound thanks to my colleagues and friends in Harare and London who kept it moving along, with their large injections of inspiration and moral support, under what were often enduring and difficult circumstances. I thank the staff in the Harrow Learning Resource Centre. I am equally grateful for the considerable assistance offered by the administration and staff of the Media Centre, and its director Ernest Mudzengi. It was there where I carried most of my research and writing while in Harare. Special thanks are due to Moses Chibaya and Linda Mujuru-Nyama for their assistance during my fieldwork. I recollect with great respect Professor Jocelyn Alexander from the University of Oxford, who helped enormously in the early stages of this project by quietly offering positive, sound academic guidance which helped put me on a rewarding path of inquiry. Many others in Zimbabwe participated in this project by donating working and living space, research facilities, critical opinions, tea and sympathy, and all of the other sorts of assistance that were most needed. Furthermore, I pay tribute to the staff and management of The Daily News and the Media Monitoring Project of Zimbabwe, for allowing me to access their archives. Were it not for the constant support, criticism and common sense of my wife Commence, this dissertation would never have been taken to its conclusion. Special thanks are due to her, and most importantly for prudently taking care of the family during my absence. 1 ABSTRACT The end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 21st century were marked by enormous social, economic and political challenges in Africa and in other developing contexts. This was partly due to the effects of a global economic recession and arguably failed national economic structural adjustment programmes, rampant public sector corruption and a rise in authoritarianism, as states tried to keep restive populations under control. Zimbabwe saw intense political struggles between the government and various agents of social change who were pressing for democratic space. This study specifically investigates how the news media in Zimbabwe played a critical role in actively mobilizing for political change and as a site for opposition politics and agitation during moments of turmoil and repression from 1997-2010. Zimbabwe‟s news media, particularly privately owned newspapers, provided more accessible platforms for robust debate that challenged the status quo in the troubled state. Not only did the private press in Zimbabwe successfully oppose the one-party state after the country attained independence in 1980, they were even more significant at the height of the economic and political governance crisis, also known as the Zimbabwe Crisis, from 2000-2010. My research focuses on the unprecedented ways in which newspaper journalism helped the cause of democratisation in Zimbabwe. The research is designed as a qualitative case study of The Daily News, a leading private newspaper whose masthead was aptly worded: “telling it like it is”. Apart from content illustration of purposely-selected headlines of newspaper articles, it was based on semi-structured interviews conducted with 51 respondents, who were mainly politicians and journalists living in Zimbabwe. I also draw upon my experience and observations of having worked for the Daily News during this eventful period. The research methods gave me access to primary data on the institutional and personal experiences of a private newspaper and its journalists, who reflected and affected the political crisis in Zimbabwe. The main aim was to investigate why and how news journalists working for a prominent private medium came to oppose an undemocratic state under conditions of repression. The analytical lens of alternative media facilitates a construction of how The Daily News and its journalists experienced, reported, 2 confronted and navigated state authoritarianism in a historical moment of political turmoil. The study discusses the complex relationships between the independent and privately-owned press, the main opposition political party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) and civil society organizations. Such groups include the labour movement and the National Constitutional Assembly (NCA), the main constitutional reform movement. This dissertation argues that in the struggles for political change that ensued between the opposition forces and the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) party, The Daily News provided form and solidity to oppositional and civic voices that were previously shut out by the dominant public media. The significance of this study is that existing scholarship on media and communication studies in Zimbabwe do not adequately capture these experiences. The agency of such media institutions and journalists has rarely been investigated. Further, the research provides an original analysis of the operations of The Daily News and its journalists in the context of highly undemocratic political moment, inclusive of the trials and tribulations, such as assaults, arrests, detentions, and office bombings, civil and criminal trials. Arguably, this study fills an important lacuna in scholarship on the role of the news media in democratising states during moments of political instability. The study thus contributes to knowledge on the experiences of alternative, opposition, activist and often radical journalists in Zimbabwe, where they championed ordinary citizens‟ stories instead of focussing entirely on expert views of the crisis. By embracing alternative media theory as the analytic lens of the study, there is arguably a normative contribution to knowledge through the use of the framework in a democratising context to broaden the understanding of the role of the news media in societies going through turbulent political transitions. 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Acknowledgements 1 Abstract 2 Introduction 9 Chapter 1: Alternative media and democratisation 33 1.0 Introduction 3333 1.1 Alternative media: from west to Africa 34 1.2 Alternative media and opposition politics 34 1.3 The purpose of alternative media 37 1.4 The significance of alternative media theory 38 1.5 Media and democracy: discourses 43 1.6 Key roles of media in democracy 43 1.7 Alternative media and democracy in Africa 48 1.8 The limitations of western media theorisation 51 1.9 General definitions of democracy 53 1.10 Forms/practices of democracy 55 1.11 African perspectives on democracy 58 1.12 Oromo democracy: an African view 60 1.13 Alternative and non-western discourses on democracy 61 1.14 The problems with western democracy 63 1.15 Key elements in rethinking democracy in Africa 66 1.16 Conclusion 71 Chapter 2: Trajectory of anti-colonial media in Africa 71 2.0 Introduction 71 2.1 Opposition Media and Democracy: A worldview 72 2.2 Nicaraqua‟s LaPrensa newspaper and opposition politics 73 2.3 Media opposition to authoritarianism in Africa 74 2.4 Anti-colonial media as mouthpiece of African nationalists 77 2.5 Media as opposition: Niger‟s Haske newspaper 80 2.6 The anti-apartheid media in South Africa 80 2.7 The impact of alternative media under apartheid (1980-1994) 82 2.8 Anti-colonial media and political struggles in Zimbabwe 85 2.9 Voice of Zimbabwe: how chimurenga resisted Rhodesian propaganda 87 2.10 History repeating itself: state-media relations 90 2.11 Discussion on state-media relations in Africa 90 2.12 The legacies of colonial media regulation in Africa 93 2.13 Conclusion 98 Chapter 3: Experiences from the field work 101 101 3.0 Introduction 3.1 Qualitative