By Dr Brighton Chireka| Year after year people are abused and even get killed for demonstrating or criticising the government of Zimbabwe.
People keep asking as to why these abuses continue to happen in Zimbabwe. There has been terrible atrocities that took place in the early 80s and the world claimed that it did not know about it as it was not publicised.
Gukurahundi tragically happened during that time in our eyes and nothing was done about it and even today nothing has been done to address the atrocities that took place.
The internet was recently shut down and some of the rumours was that the Zimbabwean government did not want the atrocities taking place to be known by the international community.
What evidence is there that the international community does respond to our social media posts? In this article I am challenging ourselves to look at our strategies that we are using to highlight our problems .
Are we using the social media to the best of our advantage? Is it working ? If not what can we do? It is only a fool that keeps on doing the same thing and expect to get different results.
Many people have rightly now taken upon themselves to make sure that the international community is aware of the suffering happening in Zimbabwe.
The recent shutdown saw my inbox full of pictures that were disturbing to me and I cried and decided to take a picture of me crying. But after crying I reflected on the events that were happening and decided to “take action”.
I was disappointed and felt abused and let down by some people in our community. Some of the pictures and videos were not from Zimbabwe and some were not from the recent incident.
It is embarrassing to equip yourself with fake pictures or videos even if among those pictures you may have genuine pictures but the mere fact that some are fake makes your case very weak .
Let me share this fact that we know about fruits so that I drive my point home into our community. If you take a piece of rotten fruit and place it beside perfectly good fruit…what happens? The mold from the rotten fruit spreads over to the good fruit and both end up in bad condition.
So what happens when we mix fake pictures or videos with genuine ones? Well….they all sadly become fake!
Another point is the way we post the pictures about what is happening in zimbabwe. To me is like “facts to be known” rather than “ disaster happening that must be challenged and averted”
People post pictures of dead people but do not tell us about where it took place and when it happened and how those people were killed and why they were killed and why they are sharing the pictures.
We are shown pictures of people looting food in shops and then tortured but no one tells us how these people are oppressed and are not able to buy any food for their families.
People talk about the land but no one tells about how this land is being given on partisan lines and also how some of those who have the land are not fully utilising it. Also we are not told that some have a dozen of farms that they are not fully utilising. On the other we are not told of the success stories of some who are farming effectively and selling their produce to the international community.
I have just highlighted a few examples where the devil is in detail and lack of if makes you hopeless or come to wrong conclusions.
In short let us have balanced reporting and call a spade a spade and not sugar coat things or exaggerate our suffering. Our suffering is worse enough so it does not need any spicing!
Rather than only calling for the social media to be open we must also make a call to all users to use it wisely and stop circulating fake news . Fake news is used to discredit whatever truth that may be coming from our country.
I see very respectable people posting fake news without verifying and when the truth comes out they do not have the decency of apologising or correcting their mistakes . Failure to do that will be used by their opponents to discredit them . Each time they share something genuine we get reminded that they are not to be trusted because of their past postings.
A social media influencer is a leader and leaders can be social media influencers as well so both must safeguard their integrity if social media is to salvage any credibility.
Remember, we all have the power to affect our community or be effected by our community so sharing fake news is an own goal as it will not help the cause of those that are genuinely suffering.
May I conclude by saying to our leaders, journalists , social media influencers and everyone please let us have self censorship and not share unverified news or pictures.
The original source of the pictures should tell us the 5 Ws that is What is happening in the picture ? Where is it happening ? ,When did it happen? , how did you get hold of the picture and why are you sharing it ? Is it for information only or you want action to be taken to stop what is happening? Failure to do that then our social media sharing will be a road to Nowhere and our suffering will continue unabated and we will shed tears till we are dehydrated.