Propaganda has its own limits

Propaganda has its own limits

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By Joram Nyathi

AS HE surveyed the mortal danger Britain faced from Nazi Germany more than a year into World War II in November 1940, when the rest of Europe lay prostrate, Winston Churchill observed: "It is lucky that we did not make any extravagant optimistic promises or predictions (about the pain or duration of the war) because a succession of melancholy disasters and terrible assaults and perils have fallen upon us.

"We have had to face these calamities; we have come through the disasters; we have surmounted the perils so far; but the fact remains that at the present time all we have got to show is survival and increasing strength and an inflexible will to win."

Even this was a gross understatement of what he had promised the British people when he took over as prime minister after Neville Chamberlain’s resignation earlier in May, whereupon he warned: "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat."

Britain won the war. Some say it was because of Hitler’s invasion of Russia, others say it was because of Japan’s foolish bombing of Pearl Harbour which forced the US’s entry into the war at the time it did. To me, Churchill won the war for Britain.

I was reminded of Churchill’s words as I read the "extravagant optimistic predictions" in the state media at the weekend about the next agricultural season. It was all about how Operation Maguta, massive new irrigation projects and mechanisation would boost agricultural production.

Before I could even digest this deluge of euphoria, reality reared its disconcerting head: there wasn’t enough electricity for tobacco and winter wheat cropping, and three fertiliser companies had shut down, the same media reported. Whereas the country required 600 000 tonnes of fertiliser, there was a mere 160 000 tonnes available. We are talking less than two months before the onset of the rainy season.

The similarity between Churchill’s Britain in 1940 and the launch of government’s land reform in 2000 is the lack of preparedness. The big difference is: for Zanu PF the timing was politically expedient; for Britain it was survival or death. Churchill maintained an unfailing sense of perspective on the enormity of the task ahead. While he extolled Britain’s victories in different theatres of the war, he knew the war still needed to be won.

This, I think, is where we got the land reform propaganda entirely wrong. We mistook a few victories in skirmishes with white farmers for agrarian victory. People who invaded commercial farms were given the impression that farming was easy; that there was no need for skill or investment; that it could be done on a part-time basis, even by cellphone. There was no need for discipline; cattle of every pedigree were slaughtered for beef while agricultural machinery and irrigation equipment were vandalised with impunity.

We were told Africans were natural farmers.

In two years Britain had proved itself equal to Hitler’s brutal war machine. Germany’s threatened land invasion was virtually impossible after the Luftwaffe failed to overcome the RAF.

We are in our seventh year of glossy propaganda about the success of the land reform; we are still making fancy predictions about food production, yet figures for tobacco, cotton, soya beans and maize show a precipitous decline since 2000. We have even breached our treaty obligations with Sadc which entrusted Zimbabwe with the food security portfolio.

I shall be happy to listen to anyone who can demonstrate that Zimbabwe has in the past seven years faced greater odds than England did in 1940 other than a failure of leadership.

Let’s accept the truth: that we failed to plan and execution was bad. The consequences have been catastrophic for the whole enterprise. Noone is accountable. Senior Zanu PF officials have been hopping from one farm to another, hoping one day to hit a rich vein leading to fabulous wealth. As I write there are people in Mashonaland West shooting each other over disputed land ownership — seven years on and seven land audits!

Because there is no planning, every cropping season comes upon us as an emergency: no seed, no fertiliser, no draught power, yet there is a minister employed full-time. Many melancholy disasters have befallen us since 2000. We are barely surviving on what we produce.

We have resorted to food imports. We don’t have the foreign currency we should be earning since the start of the land reform. This has had a terrible impact on other necessities such as drugs, fuel, power, infrastructural development, education and general healthcare.

These symptoms of our failure to execute the land reform, instead of making us face up to the reality, have led to more propaganda. It sounds more revolutionary to exaggerate the effects of Western "targeted sanctions" than to own up to our shortcomings.

While Churchill declared Britain would never surrender, he did not pretend that external help was not vital. Those who sympathised with its cause fought with it. There are many who "back" our land reform in the region but have not taken up the cudgels with us. Could it be that government is too arrogant to admit its mistakes and that we need help or is it content to live with its propaganda of success?

One cannot escape the conclusion that self-serving propaganda at the expense of national wellbeing is no better than outright treachery. The lesson from Churchill? When faced with a national crisis, don’t over-simplify it lest you induce sloth and complacency; don’t exaggerate it because you induce despondency.

There are limits to what propaganda can achieve.

Nyathi is the deputy editor of the Zimbabwe Independent
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