Editorial Comment: Thank you Zimbabwe for snubbing senseless demo call

We salute the generality of Zimbabweans for snubbing the call for senseless demonstrations by former Zanu PF Central Committee member Blessed Geza and conducting themselves in a peaceful and dignified manner.

As expected the call for demonstrations and protests was a complete flop.

The police kept a light presence, in fact in large parts of Harare including swathes of the city centre, there were no police to be seen most of the time although presumably they were on call if needed.

The police in fact seemed to be following a very commendable combination of being ready for anything without being “in your face”, following best democratic practices.

This is not to say that all that activity on social media by those who were hoping for trouble, or at least relishing in the possibility of trouble, had no effect. People have been talking about it for some days and the resulting social media frenzy and many were worried.

A common reaction was that while they and their colleagues and their neighbours were obviously not going to protest or cause trouble, they were worried that there might be some living elsewhere who would more pliant towards these calls, and that criminals might take advantage of the atmosphere. They did not want to be caught up in any violence.

So quite a lot of business people decided to remain closed yesterday, just in case, although the level of closures varied quite strongly depending on an area. A lot, but not all, city centre businesses decided not to open, giving their competition who did open a clear run.

At suburban shopping centres there were clear signs that there had been talk last week, with either most agreeing to open or most agreeing to close. The different decisions could be seen in shopping centres just a couple of kilometres apart along the same highway.

The one serious downside, at least in Harare, was the decision by so many bus and kombi owners, or their contract drivers, not to risk operating yesterday, causing severe transport problems on many routes.

Those who were operating, and working even more freely than usual since the police were not really interested in unscheduled stops and other minor misdemeanours, made good money with full passenger loads in both directions. But those who rely on public transport did often face delays.

This also affected businesses whose staff rely on public transport to get to and from work and so the transport shortage did cause some of the closed businesses, who were unable to open because staff could not get to work on time.

In light of the total calm across the country yesterday, we would hope that people will be more reluctant in future to give the credence they were giving to many social media posts and sites who they now know are not really that knowledgeable or even connected to reality.

The damage to the reputations of so many so-called gurus who pontificate on social media may make the loss of business yesterday a cheap price if future forecasts of disaster by these same self-appointed experts and would-be agitators are ignored.

But the feeding frenzy of self-appointed commentators who are so reluctant to check facts and are continually predicting disaster, added to those who amplify the voice of anyone “agin the Government” to maximum volume.

This is one of the downsides of the modern opening of communications and the easy access everyone has to social media and web pages on their phones. It can and should make it easy for people to connect with everyone else and become true citizens of the world. But it also allows trivia and falsehoods to be propagated at the same speed as serious fact and argument.

Around the world there are calls for more fact checking on social media and for at least the marking of the more dangerous views. Most people access social media through a handful of platforms. And many of these platforms have little or no controls on what people are allowed to say and how much of what they say is true and how much false.

So we are back with those who do the accessing to develop judgment to be able to assess whether what they read or hear or see is likely to be accurate. We all did this before social media when talking with relatives, friends and acquaintances, but then we did know more about who we were listening to and could make accurate assessments of how much we needed to believe.

But trusting total strangers on social media to have high levels of accurate knowledge seems to also require that they should be able to show their sources and prove that they do care about accuracy and that they go through processes to check their facts before just wanting to tell a good story and make people’s toes curl.