ABSTRACT

The Zimbabwe’s 2018 harmonised elections will go down in history as the first to be held without the name of the country’s long serving dictator and founding president, Robert Mugabe on the ballot paper. Mugabe resigned following a military coup in November 2017. This study examines how his party, ZANU-PF, used billboards to sell and rebrand itself in the much touted watershed elections on July 30. The major objectives of the paper are to find out how the party framed itself ahead of its rivals and what their key messages were. A multi-theoretical approach gleaned from political advertising, de-colonial theory, and sign theory was used as a conceptual framework. In answering given objectives, the study used social semiotics and critical discourse analysis to unearth different narratives and messages the party was selling to the electorate. The study finds that ZANU-PF framed their presidential candidate as visionary while the party was promising the electorate an improved economic environment which was hinged on re-engaging the country’s former colonisers and erstwhile enemies, the West. The party also promised a socio-political environment where Zimbabweans regardless of race, ethnicity, and tribe can co-exist peacefully, a phenomenon which was foreign during Mugabe’s reign.

摘要

津巴布韦2018年的统一选举将在历史上落下帷幕，这是首次举行的选举，而选票上没有该国长期独裁者和创始总统罗伯特·穆加贝（Robert Mugabe）的名字。Mugabe在2017年11月的军事政变后辞职。这项研究考察了他的政党ZANU-PF如何在7月30日备受吹捧的分水岭选举中使用广告牌出售和重塑自己。政党将自己摆在对手之前，并指出他们的主要信息是什么。从政治广告，非殖民主义理论和符号理论中汲取的多理论方法被用作概念框架。为了回答给定的目标，该研究使用社会符号学和批判性话语分析来发掘党出售给选民的不同叙事和信息。研究发现，ZANU-PF使总统候选人具有远见卓识，而该党则希望选民改善经济环境，这取决于重新与该国以前的殖民者和昔日的敌人西方交战。该党还保证了一个社会政治环境，津巴布韦人可以不分种族，种族和部落地和平共处，在穆加贝执政期间这是一种陌生的现象。