admin
The internet is a useful tool for development, but can also be a minefield, a jungle and an instrument that can be misused to trigger widespread alarm and despondency. It can be used to spread malicious rumours, lies and character-assassinate. Authors of offending online material may not be easily identified due to the anonymity that internet, to some degree, can provide. Yet their targets are helpless and have nowhere to turn for redress or use the same virtual platform to respond.
Baba Jukwa, the faceless Facebook character was one such internet abuser. The page posted messages that defamed people with reckless abandon and created extreme social and political disharmony particularly in Zanu-PF.
Now, we have faces to the formerly faceless blogger. Sensational weekend reports unmasked the irresponsible character as two obscure Zimbabwean journalists, Mxolisi Ncube, a former police sergeant and Mkhululi Chimoio who are based in South Africa.
In his reign of terror spanning about 12 months, Baba Jukwa had us believe that he was a Zanu-PF Politburo member disgruntled by the politics of his party, at the same time pretending to speak for a faction in the revolutionary party. The intensity of the dispatches got some people believe the lie and the opposition saw a false opportunity to make political capital out of them. They painted an image of a divided Zanu-PF, at war with itself and waiting to be defeated on July 31, 2013.
If Zanu-PF was not a solid and experienced party, there was a risk that Baba Jukwa’s incendiary dispatches could leave its leaders at each others’ throats. But the cadres responded to the provocations with a sense of immense maturity and responsibility, only brushing the virtual war aside and focusing on its campaign in the real world.
With his claim of being a senior Zanu-PF official, the revolutionary party faced a reincarnation of the Selous Scouts, that Rhodesian special services regiment whose operations were based on subterfuge, lies and other Machiavellian designs. Selous Scouts’ sinister tactics worked a few times during the war, but were ultimately ousted, just like Baba Jukwa at the weekend.
During the blog’s heydays, we remember Zanu-PF spokesman Cde Rugare Gumbo having to respond to media questions over the purported secret and top-level posts, all critical of the ruling party. He remained strong, dismissing the online character, but yesterday, he admitted that it indeed, had a destabilising effect. Good politics is the ability to stay calm and collected even when you are destabilised.
The Baba Jukwa debacle serves as a lesson for Zimbabweans, particularly the naïve among us who hold the internet as a safe place to be; those who threw their thinking caps away to religiously follow and believe him.
They were prepared to overlook many serious inaccuracies in many of the posts, as long as they satisfied their warped, senseless hunger for sensational stuff and everything against the ruling party. However, we saw some negative feedback, among them when Baba Jukwa pretended to foretell results of the last election; supposed results that were well off the mark. His followers savaged him for that, but he continued with his disgraceful writings.
Now it has been unmasked as work of two miserable, cowardly conmen seeking money and notoriety hiding under the false anonymity of the internet.
While it irritated Zanu-PF, MDC-T interpreted the facts that 300,000 people followed Baba Jukwa, and reached up to one million views on the Facebook as an indication that the character was aiding their campaign. But social media does not win elections here, particularly if it seeks to do so through outright lies.
“The conspicuous fact with far-reaching implications is that we now all know that Baba Jukwa was a fake Zanu-PF insider who claimed to be a member of the party’s Politburo when he most probably does not even know where the Zanu-PF Politburo actually meets,” commented Professor Jonathan Moyo, the Minister of Information, Media and Broadcasting Services.
We now know the protagonists, but we don’t know yet the identities of those that worked as their correspondents on the ground. It is evident that the two hopeless fellows were neither omnipresent nor highly-placed, thus had to rely on a network of informants in various parts of the country.
We expect these collaborators to be named, shamed and possible sanctions meted upon them. They participated knowingly in a dirty effort to malign, slander and trigger alarm and despondency. Now is the time for their outing as well and punishment under relevant laws of the land.
Online Reporter