Perspectives on Political Communication in Africa

This is a work of political philosophy theory which deploys concepts pertaining to power and democracy to make sense of the relationship between the African National Congress (ANC) and the media in post-apartheid South Africa. The rationale for this research is to unravel the recent and current news media–state relationships, and examine how the media has split into two factions since President Zuma’s regime. Judith Butler’s theories in The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (1997) on how power works and how a subject becomes a subject is important for this chapter as it contains pertinent theoretical positions. These will be used to understand the attempts to subjugate critical media voices in South Africa through the idea of interpellation (hailing, naming, labeling, calling, shaming, as in the Frantz Fanon sense of ‘hey nigger’) and, even more importantly, to reflect on what reflexive turns were made towards the voices of power, and why. Butler’s concepts of ‘passionate attachments’, ‘subjectivisations’ as well as ‘resignifications’ will also be used. Political power is symbolic in nature, and through the roles and the masks, that is to say through the performative dimension of interpellations, ideological subjectivisation can take place. The methodology is, first and foremost embedded in the theoretical framework. The concepts will be explained and operationalised to shine light on the complex and contradictory nature of the ANC/democracy/media relationship and how attempts are made to pin down floating signifiers such as ‘democracy’ into a fixed meaning; tied to transformation and loyalty to the ANC. The empirical findings, through discourse material, and newspaper stories specifically on President Zuma’s corruption scandals, will be examined through the prism of the conceptual analytical tools above. These enable the drawing together of reflections, the identification of patterns or attachments, the splits and contradictions, and ambivalences on the part of both the media and the ANC. Critical discourse analysis has been used primarily to understand the ideological workings in the tensions between the ANC and the independent media.

The debate about extending the presidential term limits in Rwanda first emerged in 2015. A common public perception today, as framed in the media and official political communication narratives, endorses President Kagame with the competence to protect the country and provide order to the country’s way of life. However, critical perspectives have dismissed these narratives as the ‘rhetorical politics of persuasion’. A discourse analysis of selected texts in the New Times identifies discourse frames that are seeking to shape people’s attitudes and choices in favour of the third term. The motives that the newspaper has for excluding opposing views and allotting excessive space to the ‘politically correct’ elite are not clear, but what is evident is that the majority of Rwandans are satisfied with Kagame’s reign.

Tendai Chari employs the functional analysis approach to examine adverts for Zimbabwe’s ruling Zanu PF party and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in the harmonised 2008 election campaigns. Six purposively selected political adverts published in the state-owned newspaper, The Herald are discursively analysed. Chari argues that the two rival political parties employed multi-dimensional functions of political advertising, encompassing acclaim, attack and to a lesser extent, defensive advertising to appeal for votes from the electorate. Chari further argues that the parties mobilised different discursive strategies to appeal to the electorate, with the incumbent party pleading for continuity while the opposition advocated change. He concludes that the preponderance of negativity in the campaign reflects the convergence of global and local forces in a regressed democracy.