The passage of another month has brought no change in the political stalemate facing the twenty-month old Zimbabwean Global Political Agreement (GPA).

To gain some insight as to why that stalemate still exists, eighty-two news articles from the internet media were captured and catalogued during the month of May. Each article is a unique record of a breach of the terms of the GPA. By categorising articles according to the nature of breach, basic statistics can be drawn from them.

Nineteen months on, the Zimbabwean Global Political Agreement (GPA) is still not fully implemented. A new political and economic order - promised by politicians - is still on a distant horizon, and the world media churns out a daily stream of articles describing a political landscape that closely resembles a warring battlefield.

It doesn’t take much to see where the problem lies. A simple analysis of the current state of the country can be done by capturing and cataloguing news articles about the country. For the month of April, a list of seventy-nine articles were selected from the internet media, with the criteria that they each represent a record of a unique event that details a breach of the terms of the GPA. They were then categorised according to nature of breach, and basic statistics drawn from them.

The results - from the month of April 2010 - are staggering. Twenty-two articles (27.8% of the total) detailed cases of violence, intimidation, hate speech and abductions, of which Zanu-PF were accountable for 90.9%. Cases of subversion of legal processes were second with seventeen articles (21.5% of the total), and harassment through the courts of MDC supporters and politicians came in third with 11 articles (13.9% of the total) - of which Zanu-PF was accountable for 100% of both cases. Summarising just these three most significant categories, Zanu-PF were accountable for 60.8% of breaches of the GPA that were recorded for this exercise. Space does not allow us to publish more details in this document, but suffice to say, the remaining 49.2% of breaches recorded are also almost all attributable to Zanu-PF.