Abstract
The chapter cordons off the 26 March 2022 Zimbabwean by-election developments to serve as traces that help to predict trends in the forthcoming 2023 harmonised elections. For a clearer prognostication, I make a deliberate comparative retreat from the by-elections back to the 2018 electoral patterns to draw parallels then I will use the established similarities to map them onto 2023 elections through probabilism. The by-election race fronted by the three major contending parties: the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF), the Citizens Coalition for Change (CCC) and the MDC-Alliance entails interesting “crime scenes” which informed a significant proliferation in citizen journalism through web-based social media platforms like WhatsApp, Facebook, You-Tube, Twitter and sundry. The reviewed body of scholarship on media incurs a slippage in its exclusionary coverage since it lays more emphasis on official media analysis than on citizen journalism. This long-standing research approach needs to be dismantled for a newer alternative approach that best etches the common citizens in the political dialogic space of decision-making. This chapter, therefore, engages the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) linguistic framework to enable a qualitative selection and analysis of citizens’ comments and photos on the “March 26 by-elections” Facebook page to predict the future 2023 elections. The important findings are that citizen journalism offers a more reliable, less propagandistic, rawer and faster “breaking news” feeds than official state-controlled journalism does. After the by-elections, the euphoria that flooded the Facebook platform registered the rapturing release of bottled-up expectations. The plebiscite showed minor tremors of the major 2023 seismic waves of violence and electoral malpractice being projected back into the present; however, similar trends of the by-election outcome may be maintained on the 2023 electoral graph.
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Mutingwende, A. (2023). Cordoning off the Debris of Electoral Violence and Generative Hegemony in Zimbabwean Politics: Spying on the 2023 Harmonised Elections. In: Mavengano, E., Chirongoma, S. (eds) Electoral Politics in Zimbabwe, Volume I. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27140-3_3
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