By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

AT a belated Wold Press Freedom Day function on May 16 2014, the chairperson of the Information and Media Panel of Inquiry (IMPI), Geoffrey Nyarota told the audience that the panel had ended media polarisation along partisan lines in Zimbabwe.
He said proof of the end of such polarisation was the fact that more than 30 members of the panel from diverse backgrounds travelled together throughout the country, singing the same songs as one team.
Nyarota’s claim caused confusion as to the exact role of the panel.
If Nyarota was announcing an objective finding that media polarisation had ended in Zimbabwe, why was he presenting, as of that finding, the fact that the researchers were singing one song on one bus?
Were the researchers inquiring into their own behaviour or were they examining the real existing media experience of Madzimbahwe throughout the country? Were the researchers preaching and enforcing the end of polarisation or had they made an objective finding that media polarisation had ended?
As things stand now, at mid-November 2015, has media polarisation in Zimbabwe ended?
Do the people of Zimbabwe now enjoy a wholesome national editorial convergence on most common values in the press today?
The April 17 2013 issue of The Herald gave us a hint of things to come when it reported (top front) that: “MDC-T (foreign) backers jump ship: Dispatch envoy to President (Mugabe). Make reconciliation overtures. Move read in context of poll outcome.”
The polarisation of the media along party lines was mainly sponsored as one of the means of destabilising the nation in pursuit of regime change.
With the electoral defeat of the main party collaborating with outsiders in pursuit of regime change, the outsiders would now seek to foment factions on both ZANU PF and the MDC formations and the usually vulnerable press would also degenerate from partisan polarisation to factionalisation and faction-mongering disguised as a fluid convergence.
From now on MDC-like voices and arguments would use Zimpapers and ZBC while some ZANU PF-like voices and arguments would also use the Zimbabwe Independent, The Financial Gazette, The Daily News, Newsday, The Zimbabwean and so on.
Such voices and arguments would cross the old two-way floor, not in pursuit of national convergence as intended in Chapter Two of the new Constitution, but in pursuit of a babel of factional fragmentation where personalities, personal dramas, personal attacks, insults, rumours, even personal hatreds and dislikes now displaced any remaining semblance of a lofty national agenda.
New spin doctors would twist stories, but not in the old two-party way.
The spin would now be intended to attach every major decision, every opinion, every analysis to one faction or another.
From now on there would no longer be any meaningful reading free of some alleged factional purpose.
Solid national leaders in both politics and opinion would be insulted, tarnished and denigrated by insinuating that they were acting on behalf of a faction and not for the nation at large.
As I pointed out in my October 30 instalment, the factions and counter-factions do not have to exist in terms of structures as in cells, wards, districts and provinces. To do the needed damage, the factions just needed to exist as platforms or agendas which justify attacking or promoting certain ideas, individuals or groups in the name of or against the real or imaginary ‘faction’.
Once this process begins, the factions become self-fulfilling because real people, real achievements, real interests, real legacies, real reputations come to be savaged or praised only in the name of a supposed faction.
So, if the alleged faction is the basis or source of such venom and savagery, then it must exist.
Often, however, the only thing that really exists at first is a sponsor or sponsors and a platform or platforms.
The rest is self-fulfilling prophecy.
Indeed, was the ‘Arab Spring’ a real ‘spring’?
Where is it now?
The ‘Arab Spring’ was in reality a sponsored platform.
It is nowhere to be seen anymore.
What we see now is its trail of destruction, a vacuum now filled by ISIL.
The real or imagined babel of factional fragmentation is made worse by the prior existence of single-issue non-governmental organisations (NGOs) who now come to attach themselves to one or more factions or even to individual personalities or agencies in order to advance their own singular agendas at the expense of national, cross-cutting issues.
Such opportunistic single-issue NGOs include those promoting gays and lesbians, the girl child, prostitutes, single parents, widows, religious fanatics and so on.
The apparent opportunities offered through factionalised platforms and single-issue NGOs cause reporters and editors to flip-flop big time in efforts to please one person or one faction or one sponsor who is perceived to wield awards, grants, power and influence for the moment.
One recent example of such flip-flopping happened in May and June 2015. Supported by donors and NGOs, the Constitutional Court (ConCourt) delivered a ‘landmark’ judgment in favour of prostitutes now called ‘sex workers’.
This was the pronouncement in May 2015 that loitering for the purpose of soliciting for prostitution was no longer an offence.
After all, prostitution was just a lifestyle and prostitutes were doing no worse business than housewives setting up tables and stalls to sell tomatoes and onions on the roadside.
This judgment so inspired the prostitutes’ associations that they offered judges free sex through the media.
There was near hysteria in the press and among human rights NGOs, cheering the Court and attacking the police and prosecutors.
Celebrations of the ConCourt’s decision to liberalise prostitution strangely ran almost parallel to the campaign to raise the age of sexual consent and to ban so-called child marriages, with little attention paid to the paradox that the girl child freed by the ConCourt to loiter for the purpose of soliciting for prostitution is the same as the one who was judged as incapable of consenting to sex leading to marriage.
Some stories even said girls under 18 could not be treated as capable of consenting to sex.
The pictures of prostitutes celebrating the ConCourt’s judgment in H-Metro and elsewhere clearly showed that about one-third of the prostitutes were underage girls, however.
The message, as amplified through the media following the ConCourt’s judgment, was that underage girls loitering for the purpose of soliciting for prostitution are in fact exercising their constitutional liberty to choose a lifestyle and the question of the age of consent should not be raised.
But underage girls (who may be forced by the same circumstances compelling the underage prostitute) to consent to early marriage must definitely be treated as incapable of consent.