ONLY THE TRUTH WILL SAVE ZIMBABWE!!

October 15, 2007

By Geoffrey Nyarota


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HYPERBOLE or exaggeration is a figure of speech that is found in everyday language but is especially common in poetry.

Journalists occasionally resort to hyperbole in seeking to make stories seem more important or interesting than they really are such as when sports reporters refer to "the fight of the century".

Politicians and political activists are notorious for their habitual resort to hyperbole as they seek to impress people or to emphasise a point. When President Robert Mugabe addressed his mammoth home-coming rally at Zimbabwe Grounds on February 27, 1980, Zanu-PF spokesmen estimated at one million the number of people who gathered to listen to him. I am anxious to see how many would turn up without coercion today if Zanu-PF were to organize a rally for Mugabe to address in the same venue.

The estimate of journalists who covered that Zanu-PF rally back in 1980 was a maximum of 200 000 people. Estimates of the size of political rallies in Zimbabwe have become a controversial issue.

After the closure of The Daily News by government Samuel Sipepa Nkomo, then the chief executive of Associated Newspapers of Zimbabwe, the publishing company, embarked on a fund-raising tour that took him to a number of countries abroad. The selling point of his campaign was that the jobs and welfare of 1 000 company employees were at stake.

I felt genuinely sorry for the donor community. The total size of the work-force of ANZ was just a little over 300. Many of them remain unpaid to this day, myself included.

Hyperbole occasionally creeps in retrospectively as history is recorded.

The figure of 20 000 innocent victims massacred during the Gukurahundi atrocities committed by Five Brigade in Matabeleland and the Midlands is a statistic that has over the years appeared in many reports, speeches, documents, articles and books. This figure is an estimate which cannot however, actually be pinpointed to a specific source. The recognized published authority on Gukurahundi is Breaking the Silence, Building True Peace, the report compiled in 1999 by the Catholic Commission for Peace and Justice, working in conjunction with the Legal Resources Foundation (LRF).

The 2007 edition of the document, now titled Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe, a report on the Disturbances in Matabeleland and the Midlands 1980-1988, was recently published in South Africa. It carries an introduction by Elinor Sisulu and a foreword by former Archbishop Pius Ncube. In the introduction in Part One of the report it is stated on Page 8 that: "Claims of casualty numbers have varied dramatically over the last decade, with the then ZAPU opposition party leader Joshua Nkomo mentioning a figure of 20 000 dead, and other sources putting the figure as low as 700. There is need to resolve these disparities by methodical investigation, in order to set the historical record straight."

Surprisingly for such major national issue, there has been little independent academic research conducted to establish the exact number of those who perished during Gukurahundi. There has been a tendency to be guided by our emotional fixation or attachment to the figure of 20 000. Perhaps the absence of serious research is not surprising in a nation where a genuine fear of the possible consequences of asking probing questions on this scourge now seems to exist. The latest case of journalistic hyperbole pertaining to Zimbabwe currently has my hair standing on end, as they say. It is a story that appeared on the Associated Press website.

Published under the personal byline of my old colleague Angus Shaw in Harare the article suggested that domestic pets are "now being slaughtered for meat in shortage-stricken Zimbabwe and record numbers of animals have been surrendered to shelters or abandoned by owners no longer able to feed them, animal welfare activists say".

Outraged by the mere suggestion that my compatriots back at home have been forced to add cats and dogs to their diet, I phoned a number of strategic people in Harare. My decision was in no small measure influenced by the obvious contradiction of the statement that the hunger-stricken residents of Harare were abandoning or handing their pets over to the Society for the Protection of Animas (SPCA) in unprecedented numbers. Surely, if dogs are now food residents would simply eat them, instead of handing them over to SPCA or abandoning them.

Among the telephone calls I made were one to Shaw himself, of course, and another to the SPCA.

Clever Muteura, the manager at the SPCA branch in Hatfield, Harare, dismissed the story out of hand without hesitation as a fabrication.

We have heard that story", he said. "We were very surprised to hear that the people of Zimbabwe now eat dogs. This certainly did not come from us. The people who wrote that story did not speak to us. They spoke to the people at the Zimbabwe National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, our head office. But we are the people who look after the dogs."

Muteura said there were serious problems with the story.

"When we heard about it we conducted a follow-up," he said. "Our inspectors conduct a follow-up on all the dogs that we sell or give away. After this story they did not establish that any of them were missing. That story in just not true. The majority of the people here are not even aware such a story was published. But the truth is that Zimbabweans just don’t eat dogs."

As for Shaw, initially he denied that he had reported that Zimbabweans were so hunger-stricken that they now slaughtered pets for food. I read the relevant sections of his story back to him on the phone. He then blamed the editors at Associated Press.

"I don’t know how they edit these stories," he said. "I have not seen the published story. I never see these stories once I file them. I can send you the original story."

He undertook to email to me his original article while I said I would send to him a copy of the published article, although I did not understand why Shaw never saw "these stories" on the AP website himself. Nevertheless, I immediately emailed the article to him. This was on Thursday, October 11. At the time of writing on Sunday, October 14, I have not received the promised original story from Shaw.

When I told Shaw that I had spoken to the people at the SPCA he said they had been intimidated by the CIO not to tell the truth about the eating of dogs. As an afterthought he suggested that I should return to Zimbabwe to see how the people are suffering. I assured Shaw that while I live far away in the United States I was probably more informed about the real suffering of my compatriots than he was while in Harare. Not only was I in regular communication with members of my extended family in various parts of Zimbabwe, both urban and rural. I am personally responsible for alleviating much of their suffering to ensure that the temptation never arises for them to eat dogs. I communicate even more regularly with correspondents of The Zimbabwe Times all over the country

I thought the suggestion was rather mischievous, if not spiteful. I live in the United States, not because I particularly love the country. While it does offer the majority of its citizens a comfortable standard of existence, my heart is in Zimbabwe.

However, if I acted on Shaw’s recommendation and returned to Zimbabwe I would need to create some gainful occupation for myself. There is no guarantee, to start with, that Dr Tafataona Mahoso’s Media and Information Commission would grant me a licence to start a paper or accreditation to operate as a journalist. Now if I was denied these two vital documents, how does Shaw propose that I circumvent MIC to start another paper.

Meanwhile, the fact that I live outside the borders of Zimbabwe does not mean that I have no legitimate right to ask pertinent questions about press articles that create a totally false impression of the situation in my country of birth.

As I said to Shaw on the phone, the Zimbabwe situation is so tragic that journalists do not need to resort to embellishment in reporting it. A few months ago CNN correspondent Jeff Koinange reported falsely that Zimbabweans now survives on rats. Now they allegedly dine on dogs. I suppose the next logical stage is cannibalism?

The late Reverend Canaan Sodindo Banana, the first President of independent Zimbabwe, who I had the honour to serve in the capacity of press secretary for six months, never tired of saying, "Only the truth will save our nation."