By Tafataona Mahoso

DR Vimbai Gukwe Chivaura found the media to be an important vehicle for academics to teach beyond the university and to integrate service to the university with community service.
But he did not treat media platforms and journalists as benign vehicles. He treated their role and their claims to “free expression” with healthy scepticism.
One reason for this scepticism was that the same media platforms were vulnerable to flip-floppers and fond of perpetuating the yo-yo syndrome which was costing Zimbabwe dearly at home and abroad.
Two main examples of this yo-yo syndrome which Dr Chivaura confronted may help the reader to understand the damage which Dr Chivaura believed flip-floppers were inflicting on Zimbabwe through the media.
The first had to do with the national currency, the Zimbabwe dollar.
At first the flip-floppers joined the International Monetary Fund and the Bretton Woods Institutions in campaigning for the devaluation of the Zimbabwe Dollar, claiming that it was over-valued and that Zimbabwe would achieve competitive advantage by devaluing its currency.
The media were part of this campaign.
But when the Zimbabwe dollar was thoroughly devalued, the same forces, using the media and cell phones, campaigned for the market rejection of the same Zimbabwe dollar through most of 2008 and the month of January 2009.
In this phase, the claim now was that the currency had depreciated so much that it was worthless.
The result was that the Zimdollar was taken out of circulation and replaced with the US dollar and the South African rand before the national currency was demonetised in 2015.
When the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe introduced Zimbabwean bond coins tied to the US dollar in order to ease change problems, the same flip-floppers decampaigned the bond coins, preferring instead to use South African rand coins for change together with the US dollar.
The campaign against the bond coins was also a way of testing the strength of “public opinion” (in terms of media platforms) against the idea of creating or re-introducing a national currency.
The flip-floppers, with media collusion, celebrated their temporary victory against Zimbabwe’s own bond coins which they also viewed as victory against the return of a national currency.
But when in mid-2015 the South African rand itself depreciated against the US dollar and against the same Zimbabwean bond coins, the same flip-floppers campaigned to have rand coins rejected as legal tender and to rely now on Zimbabwe’s bond coins in conjunction with the US dollar.
The point for Dr Chivaura and colleagues was that the media and so-called public opinion would not flip-flop as they did if monetary policy makers were not also flip-flopping on the national currency issue.
Only consistent monetary leadership and a consistent national monetary policy could stop the flip-flopping and speculation.
The second example of the yo-yo syndrome which Dr Chivaura and colleagues confronted concerned treatment of the African land reclamation movement and land revolution in Zimbabwe.
Long before the MDC formations adopted the view that the African majority in Zimbabwe did not want to reclaim land or to introduce a revolutionary land tenure system, the idea was planted and spread through the media using so-called opinion polls and other bogus research.
A former white Rhodesian journalist by the name of Jan Raath published the most typical example of this position on December 4 1997, two years before the same position was adopted by Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).
According to Jan Raath in The Mail and Guardian of November 28 to December 4 1997:
“It’s official. The [African] people of Zimbabwe don’t want land. They want jobs in a market economy and an opportunity to work for a decent living.”
This view had also appeared in a long editorial in The ZimbabweIndependent for December 1 1996 and the Eric Bloch column in the same paper April 11 1997.
White audiences in Britain, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, the US and Europe were fed varying versions of the same claim made by Jan Raath and other former Rhodesians as follows:
— That it was crazy war veterans who were pushing the idea of African land reclamation and land revolution against a reluctant majority.
— That land redistribution was a temporary electoral gimmick by President Robert Mugabe and his ZANU-PF who had run out of ideas to attract voters. Therefore the whole campaign would be abandoned and the African land re-claimers evicted as soon as elections were over at the end of 2002.
— That the land would be redistributed only to “Mugabe’s cronies.”
But between 2006 and 2013, Dr Chivaura and his colleagues watched in horror when the media, the MDC formations and foreign sponsored NGOs flip-flopped to the correct view that every Zimbabwean wanted land and had the right to be allocated the reclaimed land.
These are the contradictions which pushed Dr Chivaura to engage in public education campaigns beyond the walls of the university.
He wondered how and why the ZANU-PF Government allowed such confusion on serious national issues to spread at home and abroad.
Dr Chivaura’s work therefore raises major questions about the role of media and so-called public opinion polls as well as the role of intellectuals.
What Dr Chivaura always sensed in his media interventions was the difference between fleeting opinion polls and public thought (zvironzo zvevanhu) emerging from the historical process.
This distinction has been felt and explained by others before.
For instance the late Harvard University and City University of New York Professor Arthur M Schlesinger had this to say:
“What does a public opinion poll report? It reports… what people think they think [or what people think they ought to think.] It does not report what people really think, because people ordinarily don’t know what they really think in advance of a situation which compels them to act [responsibly] on the basis of their thoughts.
Public opinion polling, in short, elicits essentially an irresponsible expression of opinion — irresponsible because no action is intended to follow the expression.”
Opinion polls have their value and their function in society and in the media and they reveal a great deal about the instantaneous general atmosphere of unexamined attitudes which can shift or disappear in no time at all.