Zimbabwe’s trust in President Robert Mugabe has risen to 46%, a survey released on Thursday shows, but it gives most of the credit for the aging leader’s increased popularity to state propaganda and the fear of intimidation.
The Afrobarometer survey shows that trust in Mugabe has more than doubled from the 20% it recorded when it was last conducted, in 1999.
The South African and United States researchers attributes Mugabe’s rising popularity to the relentless propaganda by the government party, Zanu-PF, which holds a monopoly on television, radio and daily newspapers.
”Political propaganda is by far the most important determinant of presidential approval,” they say in The Power of Propaganda: Public Opinion in Zimbabwe.
”In a setting where the mass media have been strangled and the diet of public information is tightly controlled, many Zimbabweans have apparently succumbed to Zanu-PF’s view of a country beset by internal and external enemies.”
Mugabe’s surge in popularity is not matched by any improvement in the Zimbabweans’ sense of well-being.
The researchers found high levels of persistent hunger, 82% of those polled saying they had gone without any food at least one day in the past year.
And they found that political fear was at one of the highest levels in the 16 African countries that Afrobarometer has surveyed in recent years: 83% of the respondents believed that people had to be careful what they said about politics.
And only 48% preferred democracy to any other form of government — a fall from 71% in 1999.
More than 75% disapproved of Mugabe’s land seizures. – Guardian Unlimited Â