MDC: Media has crucial role in healing Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe’s main opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party on Monday said that journalists should be agents of change in the process of national healing following the signing of a power-sharing agreement by the country’s political leaders last week.

The MDC called on all Zimbabwean journalists, especially those in the state media, to play a positive role in moving our country forward through assisting national healing and creating hope among the citizenry.

It castigated the continued use of hate language on state-run television and in the official, a week after President Robert Mugabe and MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai signed a Southern African Development Community-brokered peace deal that ended eight years of hostilities between the government and the opposition.

The party was particularly incensed by an article by a columnist in the Saturday edition of The Herald newspaper which referred to MDC leaders as being puppets of the West, a familiar statement that has been used by Mugabe to refer to Tsvangirai and his colleagues in the opposition.

“Such behaviour is unwelcome and jeopardises the spirit of togetherness which was guaranteed and endorsed by SADC and the African Union in Harare last week,” an MDC spokesman said.

The columnist is believed to be Mugabe’s spokesman George Charamba who the MDC accused of being a front for a group of ruling ZANU PF officials opposed to the power-sharing deal.

“No amount of propaganda will dampen the people’s aspirations for a new beginning. The public media will dismally fail in its attempt to sabotage the current spirit of dialogue and national engagement which has been endorsed by our African brothers and sisters through the African Union,” the spokesman said. – APA