Tsvangirai’s PR department doing him more harm than good

See more Hearts of the Matter transcripts
11 June, 2009

It does not appear to me as if anyone undermines the MDC more than the MDC itself.

The MDC has undoubtedly worked very hard and deserves to be where they are, if not elsewhere better, but some of the things they do expose amateurish behaviour that can only entangle the party leader and make its supporters wonder.

Their bumbling and failure to articulate and publicise their leader’s actions, intentions and prime ministerial activities are causing a loss of respect for him.

Granted, things are said to be “getting better in Zimbabwe” but the way the MDC continues to behave is cause for concern and they should revise their modus operandi immediately.

That they went into this unity government without proper planning is no longer in doubt.

After that, they had to work hard to show the people and the world that they knew where they are headed.

Advisors and the people around Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai should work a little harder and protect him a little more since he is almost always left to explain things that should be handled by his information department.

Before entering the unity government, the Prime Minister and his party have always had problems with “spokespersons” and at one time there were three or four of them, issuing mostly conflicting reports.

Upon becoming Prime Minister, Tsvangirai suddenly fired his spokespeople and settled on former ZBC colleague, James Maridadi, as official spokesman for the Prime Minister, although Ian Makoni watches carefully and mumbles something once in a while.

Meanwhile, the party still retains Nelson Chamisa as spokesman and conflicting reports emanating from the two corners were evident when Mrs Susan Tsvangirai was killed in a car accident in March.

The Prime Minister’s Public Relations unit must wake up and do the nation a favour. They should tighten up their approach to this all important job and serve their leader, and the nation, accordingly.

It is clear that Tsvangirai is being left too much on his own and is always pushed to face the media without proper briefing, causing him to make statements he should not be making.

It is because of the shortcomings of the Prime Minister’s information department that Tsvangirai, and the party itself, always have to react to what Mugabe and ZANU-PF are doing or saying,  instead of also aggressively distributing information about their party and leader’s activities.

Granted, the state media is under the control of Mugabe, who, up to this point, has shown little interest in honouring the unity agreement, but still, if we look back, we find that it is the MDC’s fault that all these things are happening.

These things should have been insisted upon at the time the government of national unity was proposed.

Be that as it may, the MDC has no choice but to find ways of countering state media propaganda; if ZANU-PF did that with Ian Smith, why can’t the MDC do that in this age of cellphones and the Internet.

But the Information Department needs to really wake up because they are injuring Tsvangirai and the party.

The Prime Minister left for a world tour when things at home do not augur well for him, his government and the country.

The continuing farm invasions and violence on the farms are a disgrace. They, for one, show that Tsvangirai is not in control and this might also affect the response he might get from the countries on his itinerary.

His advisors must always give him a thorough briefing before he faces the media.

While I concede that diplomacy is saying the nastiest things in the nicest way, calling the continuing farm invasions “isolated incidences” is not helpful before the Europeans and Americans from whom Tsvangirai needs financial support for his government.

For this, I blame his advisors and the information department within his office.

The Prime Minister is now made to look uninformed yet most of the advance work should be done long before the Prime Minister meets the media and the people; long before he issues a statement and long before he meets with other leaders.

As he boarded his plane for Europe, Mrs Sekai Holland, (Tsvangirai’s) Minister for National Healing, Reconciliation and Integration, told and warned the BBC of all people, that Zimbabwe could be headed for a new wave of violence and that “opponents of the power-sharing government were drawing up assassination lists”.

Mrs Holland now denies having said this.

This is serious business and the timing of this information poses further hurdles for the Prime Minister during his trip.

The Prime Minister’s Office needs to seize the opportunity. Flow of information is vital and they should not always just wait to react and explain; they should generate information and give it out by any means necessary, not to always whimper about the state owned newspaper, the Herald and the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation.

The so-called War Veterans, who had been busy trying to figure out what to do with the farms they grabbed, are slowly coming back into the picture with renewed vigour. And the elections are looming.

Do we see a pattern here? Is someone carefully trying to make Tsvangirai look incompetent? Some things are too elementary and must be blamed on the Prime Minister’s staff.

The slow and ominous re-emergency of the war veterans is a challenge that has to be contained, in one form or other. People need to be protected from the war veterans’ barbarism because they form the core of Mugabe’s destabilising machine.

Some of them are so misguided and desperate now that they will not hesitate to kill for a loaf of bread.

“We have not yet succeeded in restoring the rule of law ... our people do not live free from fear, hunger and poverty,” Tsvangirai said to his party two weeks ago, adding that the official state media remains biased and there is only limited freedom of movement and expression.

He gave his party’s annual convention a bleak assessment of the situation in the country and said that hard-liners backing Mugabe were frustrating progress, exactly the same words Mrs Holland denies repeating to the BBC.

Evidence abounds to buttress what the Prime Minister told his party and this should have been hyped up. People should know what Mugabe and ZANU-PF are doing all the time so as to invite sympathy, understanding and support for Tsvangirai.

If well informed, people will understand why certain things happen or do not happen because they would be well informed about the destabilising acts of the people with whom Tsvangirai is working.

As the Prime Minister tours several nations for both financial and moral support, it is a terrible indictment on his information staff that one of its own, Mrs Holland, gets entangled in denying things said before and blames the media.

It goes without saying that Mr Maridadi, as the Prime Minister’s spokesperson, has to work harder and match his responsibilities with gusto and professionalism.

He just has to do better than this and he has to be serious about his responsibilities.

Maridadi and the MDC have bungled on the issue of “the mysterious woman” seen with Tsvangirai at Jacob Zuma’s inauguration; they have bungled about that woman’s involvement in invading a farm and claiming her to be Tsvangirai’s niece, forcing the Prime Minister’s office to deny any relationship between her and Tsvangirai. The manner in which the whole thing was handled has tarnished the Prime Minister’s image and causes us to wonder what really this is all about.

The heart of the matter is that the Prime Minister’s Information Department and his advisors must take their responsibilities seriously. They have to give him thorough briefings so that he does not flip flop. It does not help that only two weeks ago, Tsvangirai admitted before his party conference that his “efforts to restore democratic freedoms and the rule of law have so far failed” and this is not the gospel he is preaching overseas as he seeks funding.

Tsvangirai, however, should have concentrated on normalizing the situation before approaching these people who have set their own requirements about releasing any money to Zimbabwe.

What do you say? Send me your comments on tano@swradioafrica.com I am Tanonoka Joseph Whande and that, my friends, is the way it is today, Thursday, June 11, 2009.