In a stark and revealing juxtaposition of misaligned priorities, the Zimbabwean government under President Emmerson Mnangagwa has announced the allocation of a staggering US$10 million to the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC) for “content creation.” This decision, made not in a vacuum but against a backdrop of a profound national crisis, is more than a mere budgetary misstep. It is a profound moral abdication, a symbol of a regime obsessed with narrative control over national salvation, and a direct insult to every citizen struggling under the weight of a collapsing public sector.
While Zimbabwe’s institutions mirrored in struggles seen in universities globally, such as the University of Manchester’s own investigations into student support failures grapple with decay, the government’s solution is not investment and repair, but propaganda and spectacle.
The parallels with the challenges outlined in the University of Manchester’s report are illuminating, yet the context in Zimbabwe is infinitely more dire. The Manchester case speaks of a student failing to meet deadlines, provide evidence, or engage with feedback, with the institution pledging (however inadequately) more support and monitoring. In Zimbabwe, the entire national “project” is the student in distress, and the government is the negligent institution, failing on every conceivable metric. The “additional support” promised to citizens is nonexistent; the “monitoring” is the surveillance of dissent. The Mnangagwa administration, like the university managers focusing on individual student “mistakes,” prefers to frame national collapse as a series of isolated personal failures of laziness, of sanctions, of anything but its own corruption and incompetence rather than a systemic, governance-created catastrophe.
The US$10 million for ZBC content creation must be understood within this framework. It is not an investment in public broadcasting; it is a direct investment in the machinery of regime legitimization. The ZBC has long ceased to be a public broadcaster, functioning instead as a partisan mouthpiece, a producer of sycophantic content that glorifies the ruling ZANU-PF elite while vilifying opposition and obscuring reality. This fund will not finance investigative journalism into the healthcare crisis, educational documentaries on sustainable agriculture, or children’s programming to nurture young minds. It will finance more hours of chanting party loyalists, more slickly produced segments praising “His Excellency’s Vision 2030,” and more diatribes blaming Western sanctions for problems rooted in local graft. It is a £10 million down payment on a national fantasy, a deliberate attempt to construct a digital Potemkin village to hide the ruins.
Consider what this sum represents in a nation where the very pillars of society are crumbling. This is money that could immunize hundreds of thousands of children, stock empty pharmacy shelves with essential drugs, or pay living wages to teachers and nurses for months. It is capital that could resuscitate critical infrastructure repair water treatment plants, purchase transformers to end rolling blackouts, or provide seed and fertilizer subsidies to desperate farmers. Instead, it is being funnelled into a vanity project designed to convince a suffering populace that their suffering is either an illusion or a necessary sacrifice on the path to a prosperity that never arrives. This is the ultimate “content creation”: creating the content of a compliant citizenry, one anaesthetized by a barrage of false narratives.
The Manchester report’s mention of “not providing sufficient evidence for their claims” finds its grotesque national parallel in the Mnangagwa government’s entire modus operandi. This is an administration that made claims of a “New Dispensation” and “open for business,” yet provided no evidence in the form of democratic reforms, judicial independence, or economic stability. It claims to fight corruption while its own officials are mired in scandal. It claims sovereignty while its policies deepen dependency. The US$10 million for ZBC is a tool to bridge this credibility gap not with evidence, but with volume to shout down inconvenient truths with a wall of state-sanctioned noise.
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Furthermore, the report’s point about “not responding to feedback from staff” is the defining characteristic of the Mnangagwa regime. The feedback from “staff” the Zimbabwean people has been clear and consistent: protests, strikes, voter turnout in urban centres, and a massive diaspora vote with its feet. The government’s response has never been dialogue or course correction. It has been repression, abduction, torture, and legal persecution. The “additional support” and “increased monitoring” it offers are the support of the Central Intelligence Organisation and the monitoring of activists’ social media. The “commitment to ensuring similar incidents do not occur” translates to ensuring dissent does not occur, through ever more draconian laws like the Patriotic Act, which criminalizes fundamental freedoms.
The tragedy is that a genuine investment in content creation for a truly independent public broadcaster could be a nation-building exercise. It could tell Zimbabwe’s rich, complex stories, foster national dialogue, and hold power to account. But that is precisely why this investment in the ZBC is so pernicious. It perverts the very idea of media, education, and national story. It takes resources meant for the public good and uses them to narrow, partisan, and anti-democratic ends. It is a direct transfer of wealth from the public purse to a propaganda arm, a form of institutionalized corruption that robs the citizen twice: first of the material benefits the money could provide, and second of their right to truthful information.
This decision also exposes the hollowness of the government’s purported concern for education and youth. While universities in Zimbabwe face far more severe versions of the Manchester scenario with lecturers perpetually on strike over pauper wages, libraries with decades-old books, and students learning in dilapidated infrastructure—the state’s priority is manufacturing consent, not cultivating minds. The message to the youth is unambiguous: your intellect, your potential, your future are less valuable than the regime’s presentational needs. Your authentic struggles with a collapsed system are a liability to be airbrushed from the national narrative, replaced with the curated image of grateful beneficiaries of state benevolence.
In the final analysis, the US$10 million ZBC fund is a perfect metaphor for the Mnangagwa era. It is style over substance, manipulation over management, and self-preservation over service. It demonstrates that the regime’s primary project is not economic recovery, social justice, or national development, but political survival through information control. It is an admission that it cannot win hearts and minds through performance, so it must rent them through propaganda.
As the University of Manchester works, however imperfectly, within a framework of accountability to address its institutional failings, the Zimbabwean government operates in a vacuum of accountability, creating failures and then investing in hiding them. The £10 million is not just a misallocation; it is a strategic weapon in a war against reality. It ensures that while the nation’s foundations. Its schools, hospitals, and economy continue to erode, the official broadcast signal will remain strong, clear, and filled with lies. This is the profound criticism under Emmerson Mnangagwa, Zimbabwe is not being governed. It is being produced, and the citizens are not the audience but the unwilling extras in a costly, tragic, and endlessly looping show of power’s decay.
- Lloyd Chiedza Shumbayaonda is a Zimbabwean based in the Diaspora. He writes in his personal capacity.