Facebook Scared Mugabe

Politics
FOR all its pretences of trying to lure the youth, Zanu PF seems dead scared of new media, particularly Facebook and Twitter,

FOR all its pretences of trying to lure the youth, Zanu PF seems dead scared of new media, particularly Facebook and Twitter, which it ironically wants to use to entice young voters.

Report by Nqaba Matshazi

While it is now accepted that President Robert Mugabe declared July 31 as the date for elections because he wanted to abide by a Constitutional Court ruling, it seems the President may have been cajoled into action by a Facebook post.

Going by Justice minister Patrick Chinamasa’s own admission, a Facebook post by Minister of State in the Prime Minister’s Office, Jameson Timba, jolted Mugabe into setting an election date, as they (Zanu PF) felt the MDC-T would sabotage him.

Timba, Chinamasa alleged, had plotted to subvert the parliamentary process, and to pre-empt that Mugabe had to act and so he used the Presidential Powers (Temporary Measures) Act, to unilaterally amend the Electoral Act and set a date for elections.

In the Facebook post, Timba had said: “Zanu PF has to agree to an electoral roadmap otherwise the MDC-T will use its parliamentary numbers to force Mugabe into a climb-down.”

Not to be outdone, a The Herald columnist Nathaniel Manheru, popularly believed to be Mugabe’s spokesman George Charamba, also conceded that the Facebook posting had inspired the President into action. Manheru describes Timba’s posting as a “fatal brag from a dimunitive”.

“It was a fatal brag by the diminutive minister, a real threat to obstruct law-making via Parliament,” Manheru wrote in his weekly column. “The President had been forewarned, and thus forearmed himself.”

Strangely, as he does not know the difference, Manheru says the posting was on Twitter rather than Facebook.

In its drive to win the youth vote, Zanu PF has joined social media platforms it initially was sceptical of, but it seems they have not fully embraced these.

In a recent interview with South Africa’s Mail&Guardian, Zanu PF deputy director of information and publicity Psychology Maziwisa said the party was “going all out and we would particularly like the young generation, who are the most active on social media, to take charge of this election”.

But that does not seem to be the line his political masters are following.

At its conference last December, Zanu PF literally threatened a crackdown on social media, which it says needs to be regulated.

“Although social networking sites have significantly contributed to the way people communicate, the need for a regulatory framework cannot be overemphasised . . . Family values are under threat from social media,” Zanu PF political commissar Webster Shamu explained after the meeting.

“The Internet has also been promoting misinformation worldwide by spreading inaccurate information which people perceive as factual.”

The party has always had a love-hate relationship with new media, as just recently it went on a crusade calling for the banning of shortwave radios and arresting people and organisations that distributed them.

A couple of Zimbabweans have been hauled before the courts for posting on Facebook comments deemed unflattering to Mugabe.