Over a month ago, the US accused African Stream – without evidence – of being a Russian propaganda outfit. Since then, we’ve been banned by social media giants such as Google, Meta and TikTok. Yet the irony is that it’s actually Washington funding propaganda abroad – including in Africa.
Zimbabwe in particular has been in its sights. In the last two decades, Washington has pumped money into two radio stations that Harare accuses of being mediums of ‘Western imperialist propaganda.’
The first is the now-defunct Short Wave (SW) Radio Africa, which broadcast from its London-based studios into Zimbabwe and other neighbouring countries from 2001 till 2013. The station’s news and programmes were widely seen as biased towards the Western-aligned opposition party, Movement for Democratic Change. The government of Zimbabwe accused the station of having a ‘regime-change agenda’ at the behest of Western nations that had imposed economic sanctions on the Southern African country in the early 2000s in the wake of its land redistribution programme. A 2005 diplomatic cable from the US embassy made public by Wikileaks revealed that the station had received funding from the US government to enable it to carry out its broadcasts. The allegations of Western funding and a regime-change agenda were given further credence in 2014 when the station announced it was shutting down. In an interview with the BBC station, founder and manager, Gerry Jackson attributed the closure to the decision by ‘donors’ to turn off the money tap due to ‘massive disarray’ in the opposition camp.
The second station is the Washington-based Voice of America Studio 7, which has been beaming its signal into Zimbabwe for over 20 years using a transmitter in neighbouring Botswana, an act that the government of Zimbabwe has in the past described as piracy and an attack on its sovereignty. Like SW Radio Africa, Studio 7’s broadcasts have been highly critical of the Zimbabwean government. The US government wholly funds Studio 7 through the State Department’s US Agency for Global Media, which, on its website, explicitly states that its mission is to ensure that ‘the long-range interests of the United States are served by communicating directly with the peoples of the world by radio.’
The hypocrisy is clear: while funding media entities to spread its propaganda to African audiences, the US is using unfounded allegations to gag independent outlets such as ours from reaching our fellow Africans with a radical anti-imperalist and pan-african message.
Sources:
https://allafrica.com/stories/200310140498.html
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2002/jan/24/Zimbabwenews.zimbabweandthemedia
https://www.newsweek.com/gerry-jackson-independent-radio-zimbabwe-president-robert-mugabe-zimbabwe-broadcasting-corp-london
https://insiderzim.com/us-funded-sw-radio/
https://www.voazimbabwe.com/a/zimbabwe-gerry-jackson-sw-radio-africa/2685595.html
https://www.herald.co.zw/govt-to-quash-pirate-radio-stations/
https://mg.co.za/article/2005-03-16-fact-or-fiction-what-the-papers-say/
https://cpj.org/2006/07/overseas-broadcaster-reports-jamming/
https://www.insidevoa.com/a/a-13-34-zimbabwebroadcastsfeb2005/177921.html
https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/05HARARE147_a.htmlhttps://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/06HARARE977_a.html