DOI: 10.36347/sjahss.2015.v03i02.008

Pages: 397-404

The post 2008 election in Zimbabwe brought a Government of National Unity. This was a rare arrangement in the country and as such brought an opportunity for academics and researchers to study the bottlenecks faced by such a government from many different perspectives. This paper focuses on the challenges and compromises communicators or information officers faced in branding the Inclusive Government in Zimbabwe. The three political parties, (ZANU PF, MDC T, MDC M) who formed this government did not make it any easier as the other two parties brought their own communication specialists to handle their own affairs. While the populace had a sigh of economic relief when this government assumed power, communicators had headaches as many a times they were forced by circumstances to be partisan. Whilst it is undisputed that the SADC facilitated government was viewed by the citizenry as the better arrangement for the country then, the politicians in the inclusive government could not stop bickering and pursuing their partisan hegemonic interests whilst in Government thus making this enquiry worthwhile and key to future arrangements of this nature. This paper thus strove to ascertain the challenges and compromises that professionals within the civil service in general faced given the contestations between the warring parties that were in government. Several traditional theories such as the theory of hegemony, ideology, propaganda and agenda setting informed this study. Archival research and observations were the two main research methods used in this paper. The study found out that there was a number of challenges and compromises the communicators faced from both internal and external stakeholders.