Chronicle Editor
RADAR
This is a familiar tale. Some not-so-strange faces were this week bombarding social media, urging people to take to the streets to protest the imminent introduction of bond notes.The campaigners were fancying a shutdown of some kind and Newsday, a paper owned by one Trevor Ncube, himself one of the cheerleaders of the campaign, led unwittingly with the headline, “Zim braces for crippling demo”.
We shall return to Trevor shortly.
But you have to pity the poor reporter and editors who were forced to pronounce from the hilltops such “news” by the owner of the company.
You can imagine the poor editor and reporter being fed something ugly and tasteless down their reluctant throats.
And poor guys, do they have a choice!
You see them struggling to make something out of nothing and to dramatise such a damp squib.
News is what the owner says is news.
We learnt that at school so many years ago.
They call it the political economy of the media.
It’s a pity when you have an owner like Trevor Ncube who reduces himself so low to become an unashamed anti-Government activist, often for shallow populist fads.
You will recall his seeming orgasmic excitement with the so-called #ThisFlag campaign and its front man Evan Mawarire as he saw a Twitter revolution in the country anchored on people holding flags and denouncing the Government.
Well, as is now common knowledge, that did not come to pass and a lot of egg was left on faces like Trevor’s.
But the same characters always come with more hashatags, not only to cover up for continued failures and to divert attention, but also in the hope that they can eventually strike some counter-revolutionary gold.
Trevor Ncube has reduced himself to the army of anti-Government social media activists.
You wonder if he has anything productive he does besides following these hashtags that at the end of the day end in grief.
Perhaps he thinks that it is business in the new millennium.
We should have seen results of this grand strategy years ago but as far as we gather, things continue going south for his businesses.
The poor editors and reporters that are continuously called upon to write screaming self-serving protest and gloomy stories are hardly fed.
The last time we checked their salary payments were in arrears — not to mention that they are being paid part salaries.
Trevor should find more time to address these issues — the bread and butter issues of his workers — than spend time tweeting never-never social media revolutions.
Unless, as has become apparent, it is a diversionary tactic and he wants to project self-fulfilling prophecies.
There is another privately owned newspaper stable in that bad habit.
The owners force negativity down editorial throats so as to soften their workers into accepting no-pay, poor working conditions because “zvinhu zvakaoma”.
How crafty!
How evil!
We are not lost to the fact that Trevor Ncube is a veritable charlatan and hypocrite.
His opposition to bond notes, as he is ensconced in South Africa, is a direct attack on his own workers from the street vendor to the most abused editor who have suffered from a cash crisis occasioned by the US dollar which businessmen like him have shipped, and continue to ship, out of the country.
Nobody is served by his hypocritical stance at all.
At any rate, it shows the unprincipled nature of some people who seek to prolong the suffering of ordinary Zimbabweans so that they continue to ride on their poor backs.
It does not help that given all the discourse around, some people still pretend to be confused about Government policy and attendant legal measures as have been applied in the case of bond notes.
They still feign confusion.
They still oppose, for the sake of it.
Trevor Ncube thinks that such populist behaviour will continue to make him relevant.
It is all about his ego and social media appeasement.
He cannot stand for the truth or reason.
He has to show that he opposes Government at all costs.
Grief, and a baby
And as the reader may know by now, the so-called “MunhuWeseMuroad” protest against bond notes met spectacular grief.
Nobody seemed to heed that call.
Instead, roads appeared to lead to where people ordinarily spend their days working for families, buying and selling; visiting others and meeting lovers.
There wasn’t anything dramatic.
Definitely no shutdown and nothing was crippled.
It was business as usual.
The piece of news that seemed interesting was that the organisers of the said demonstration, notably one Patson Dzamara, had appeared at hospitals on suspicious allegations of having been abducted and tortured.
That is a perfect alibi.
But it also speaks to what we have been pointing out that for all the noise on social media, people like Patson Dzamara, Evan Mawarire and Sten Zvorwadza do not command any grassroots following.
You can include Tajamuka there.
They all have been riding on causes of particular constituencies to make themselves relevant — even to the extent of pilfering ownership of the same like they did the other time with the civil servants strike.
Alone, these morons are nothing.
They are just cyber busybodies who justify that lofty status by street cameos all to attract the attentions of donors.
There is money to be made there.
But the ruse is fast falling apart.
People now see through the machinations of these professional activists.
They are in it for the money and personal glory.
They use people — gullible ones.
It was an overwhelming success for Evan Mawarire who rode on cheap populism to earn himself cushy stay in South Africa’s Sandton where he was feted like a prince; and now in the USA where he is apparently enjoying an open-ended stay as an exile.
Good news, for him, as we saw in pictures on social media is that he has even had a baby there.
That baby will be American and enjoy all the benefits accruing to American guests, thanks to the deep pockets of American people from the sweat of African slaves whom Mawarire regards with scorn when they remind him he is an Uncle Tom.
Lucky him.
Online Reporter