Contradictory Politics and the Mutation of Crisis in the Postcolonial Zimbabwean Urban Clean-up Campaign

The low tolerance to political diversity and transformational politics in postcolonial Zimbabwe are products of unrevised government policies, privatising politics in the hands of nationalists and an escapist attribution of virtually all the internal crises to the West. While the West may be accountable, to some extent, the country’s confrontational urban planning and intolerance to dissent, from both the civil society and opposition politics, are demonstrable as a precautionary audit depicted through heavy-handed state militarism which further precipitate the country’s democratic deficit. This chapter examines the nature and extent of the Urban Clean-Up Campaign that transpired between 2017 and 2021 in the major cities of Harare and Bulawayo. To engage with how the event is reported in the four state-controlled newspapers, The Herald, The Sunday Mail, Kwayedza and Umthunywa, the chapter makes a qualitative selection of media reports covering this polarised and interesting period. This chapter established a gap in previous literature that suffers from a paucity of research in terms of linguistically-rooted analyses around the informal sector demolitions. The present chapter, therefore, contributes to the existing body of research by engaging Martin and White’s (2005) Appraisal Theory to capture authorial stances adopted by news reporters in reporting state-sponsored operations. My discovery of the unique promulgation of ideological subjectivity reporting by journalists exposes the government as one of the chief authors of internal crisis. As a mode of impression management and the extent of the state’s media monopoly, news reporters engage in heteroglossic attitudinal stances through concealing backstage internal realities and government excesses. This, however, has inevitably mutated into a series of socio-economic and political crises that have stomped on the freedoms and lives of the urban poor.