Talent Moyo

ABSTRACT The paper examines how the discourse of sexuality was employed to gain political legitimacy by the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) to out-manoeuvre their political rivals Movement for Democratic Change-Tsvangirai Faction (MDC-T) in the Zimbabwean elections of 2013. In the context of Zimbabwe politics, the nexus between sexual discourse and political contests presents a conspicuous shift from dominant day-to-day mundane political debates centred on policy to debates of personal (mis)conduct and morality. The nexus between sexuality and political legitimacy is analysed using Michel Foucault’s ideas on sexuality: repressive hypothesis and biopower. The paper maintains that the media have been used to disseminate the discourse of sexuality to the electorate. Importantly, the influence of media is scrutinised using the theory of mass communication and media politics as articulated by Castells, and the Propaganda Model postulated by Herman and Chomsky. Through Critical Discourse Analysis and results from unstructured interviews the paper observes that the discourse of sexuality had a considerable bearing on gaining political power. Lastly, the paper observes that, although the discourse of sexuality has a symbiotic relationship with amassing political power, there were other factors that influenced the electoral outcome.

The nadir of Zimbabwe’s economic precipice ushered with it unpalatable ramifications upon citizens of Zimbabwe. This exigent and cataclysmic social environment gravitated the need for social protection and social security to salvage resultant social pathologies. Generally, in the context of economic meltdown, provision of social protection and social security by the government came to a standstill as the country’s currency lost value. This created lots of problems to the citizenry at large. Poverty permeated into the masses and compelled them to lead a purgatory life. Against this backdrop, this chapter maintains the view that the failure by the government to provide with viable social protection and social security led to informalisation and privatization of social protection and social security. The chapter provides a diachronic trajectory of historical development of social policy in Zimbabwe in order to comprehend social policy. Critical, are the social protection and social security schemes established since independence of Zimbabwe up to year 2005. The inevitable failure of these schemes consequently led to informalisation and privatisation of social protection and social security. Therefore, the chapter discusses informal and privatised social protection and social security under the context of economic downturn of Zimbabwe. The chapter concludes by positing recommendations for social protection and social security for policy makers in Zimbabwe.