The Architecture of Political Expediency in Zimbabwean Politics: Post-event Functionality and Image Repair

The pre-, peri-, and post-election periods have seen a steep increase in acts of violence and killings in Zimbabwe which has grossly tarnished the public image of contesting political parties and exposed them to precarity and fragility in the election race. This chapter uses the multi-dimensional critical discourse analysis (CDA) framework to examine the Harare 2018 post-election killings, the Kwekwe March 2022 pre-byelection murder, and the Nyatsime 2022 mutilation, and considers how the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF), the Citizens Coalition for Change (CCC), and the Mwonzora-led Movement for Democratic Change-Tsvangirai (MDC-T) use the media to deflect wrongdoing for expediency. To help conceptualize this ideological image-reconstruction process, the author adopts (Decò et al., Earthquake Engineering & Structural Dynamics 42:1469–1487, 2013) post-event functionality model, which describes how structural engineers engage in post-event reconstruction processes on buildings and structures after devastating human-induced and natural disasters. The resultant cracks or collapse may lead to the suspension of structural operations to permit the reconstruction of stronger structures. Similarly, politicians engage in image reconstruction to resuscitate their soiled images. The chapter selects for linguistic analysis online reports drawn from both privately owned (NewsDay, the Daily News) and state owned (Sunday Mail, The Herald) newspapers to unravel political ideological projections and journalistic subjectivities vis-à-vis the media objectivity/neutrality ideal. The major findings are that politicians exploit the media to advance ideological interests at the expense of the population.