Sometimes I figure Zanu PF in its parochial propaganda and smear campaign gives Morgan Tsvangirai too much deist powers. I don’t think Zimbabweans will take to the streets simply because “Tsvangirai told them to.” If any revolution  is to be televised here, it will follow the standard set in the troubled North: the people themselves will take charge, not some politician being credited with inspiring mass protests as if the people were unthinking zombies. We already know what happened here before about that attempt at “organised” street marches so we won’t bother dwell on  the thesis of street any percieved protests being ostensibly led by someone who himself is a player in the power games. So if Zanu PF believe Tsvangirai will lead “peace loving people” into orgies of anarchy, well Zimbabweans have every right to feel insulted. This century’s revolutionaries certainly do not need a figure head, just the politics of the belly – among other body parts -  are enough to push grannies and teenagers to the streets. Tsvangirai the fall guy. Go figure.

From Business-ethics.com:

When the Egyptian government created a partial communications blackout on Thursday, shutting Internet and cell-phone service, it asked for the cooperation of foreign mobile phone companies. UK-based Vodafone complied, saying it had no choice but to cut service.

In a statement issued Saturday, Vodafone said the Egyptian government would have been able to shut the network itself anyway, all within the bounds of Egyptian law. Mobinil, another major provider, which is owned in part by France Telecom, also complied.

Did they have any choice?

Read more

Some of our SMS subscribers do – But not all of them! We asked them this very question, and here are a few of their replies:

• Plenty of Egyptian. Would need plenty of camaraderie
• Thanx . As activists, we are monitoring the Egypt crisis. Pro Mubarak are now disturbing the wave of change, If others can change, can we? Yes we can!
• That’s the stuff  im made of , together we can do it
• Yaah full of Egyptian spirit
• Yes Egyptian style acceptable here. I think the real face of Africans has been exposed, need for blacks and muslims to uprise against dictators
• I don’t do it the Egyptian way, I do it through the ballot, It is more civilised.
• It started in Tunisia , now in Egypt, who is next
• Sorry, this naturally not the land of the Pharoahs!
• The Egyptians have shown us we can do the same here if we stand together and speak with one voice even with the threat of live bullets. I’m ready!
• The Egyptian revolution is very interesting and a clear warning to other tyrants that their days are also numbered. Dictators always fall with a bang. God bless Egypt!

You can’t be apolitical. It will come and get you. It’s not that you shouldn’t be neutral. It’s that you won’t be able to stay neutral.
- Christopher Hitchens

But what is the lesson of the recent events for southern Africa? In particular, what lessons does the wave of protests sweeping the Middle East have for Zimbabweans?

The most important lesson to come out of Egypt and Tunisia, it seems to me, is that revolutions cannot be outsourced. There has been something rather obscene about the ways in which some human rights activists, Zimbabwean and non-Zimbabwean, have presented the problems in Zimbabwe as if they are entirely SA’s or, to be exact, Thabo Mbeki ’s. One got the impression sometimes that these activists wanted Mbeki and South Africans in general to march on Harare. Some even suggested SA invade Zimbabwe.

What these hysterical calls did was absolve the prodemocracy movement in Zimbabwe of the responsibility to take the lead in the fight against Robert Mugabe’s dictatorship. Why is it, for example, that none of us who want to see Mugabe out of office and on trial for all sorts of crimes have bothered to ask why the Movement for Democratic Change, whose roots are supposedly in Zimbabwe’s labour movement, has yet to organise a successful strike, stayaway or other form of popular protest?

None of this is to ignore the brave men and women, journalists, lawyers, farmers and ordinary citizens who have protested against Mugabe’s rule and paid with everything from their lives to their limbs and property. The actions of these people must be recognised and honoured. But they cannot and should not be the exception.

Zimbabweans cannot outsource their revolution. They cannot leave the fight for their freedom to others. Sure, they need support, solidarity and the knowledge that the rest of the world is on their side. But they cannot expect the fight to be led by outsiders. That, for me, is what the Egyptians and the Tunisians have taught us.

Mubarak has one of the most formidable repressive machineries in the world but that has proved worthless in the face of popular protest. Voting with their feet, as the millions of Zimbabweans have done by moving to SA, Zambia, Botswana, Canada, Australia, the US and the UK, must have been a difficult thing to do. But it is by no means courageous. Courage is staring down a dictator, telling him to go and standing your ground. That is what the North Africans have done. Let us hope Zimbabweans learn from them.

Read the whole story from BusinessDay here

“The idea that I can reach out and take a person’s voice and help yield it up to that many people — I’m proud of that,” he says. “That’s really more interesting to me than my own voice.”

Be inspired by John Scott-Railton:

When the Egyptian government blocked the Internet last week in response to demonstrators’ use of social media like Twitter and Facebook to organize mass rallies, it not only cut off communication between ordinary Egyptians — it also muted their dialogue with the rest of the world.

For John Scott-Railton, a graduate student at University of California-Los Angeles, that silence was a personal blow. He had been visiting Egypt since 2006, going over there to see a close friend, and as the country accelerated towards revolt, he had been following the news on the Internet. Suddenly his connection was gone.

So Scott-Railton decided that if Egyptians couldn’t communicate with the world, he would do it for them, and set out to replicate the cacophony of voices he had been so drawn to. Reaching out to friends in Egypt by telephone, he started gathering updates from different neighborhoods and posting them online at his Twitter account @Jan25voices, named for the day the protests began. When he heard that Egypt’s mobile-phone networks were likely to be shut down, he drew up a list of people he knew with landlines. Over the roughly 24 hours on Friday when cellular communications were turned off, many journalists struggled to file their stories on the protests. But anyone following Jan25voices knew what was going on. “Some of the updates I was getting were from people’s aunts standing at the window, holding their phone out so I could hear what was happening,” he says.

In an earlier age, Scott-Railton would have had no choice but to wait, perhaps as he searched the dial for mentions of the events in Egypt. Today, the 27-year-old Michigan native is in the middle of the information flow, one of a host of bloggers and Tweeters who are — in many cases — doing as much as professional journalists to deliver news the Egyptian government is struggling to contain.

Scott-Railton’s Twitter account lists him as having just over 4,000 followers, but that considerably understates his influence, as his tweets — which he posts at a rate of around 50 a day — are visible to all those who search for information on the protests. Blake Hounshell, managing editor of Foreign Policy Magazine, subscribes to his posts, as do the editors of several other major news publications. And Scott-Railton says that the BBC, NPR, the Los Angeles Times, Al Jazeera and the Wall Street Journal have all reached out to him for analysis or help finding Egyptians to interview. “In years past, the idea was that you could only understand the situation if you were on the ground,” says Sree Sreenivasan, a professor of digital media at Columbia Journalism School in NYC, who has been tracking the developments in Egypt. “What we have learned though is that there is a real role for social media for people who are far away from the action to bring context, understanding and analysis.”

Scott-Railton, who speaks rudimentary Arabic and has mostly used English — and occasionally French — in his reporting, has no training as a journalist. And yet, “a lot of the questions of journalistic ethics are now on my mind,” he says. “How do you confirm information? How do you avoid echo chambers? How do you substantiate?” When new sources began emailing him after his initial postings, he insisted they provide contacts, preferably in the U.S., who could vouch for their identities. He says his goal is to provide the “human component” of the story, “to make it feel as exciting and as relevant as the pictures of tanks rolling around.”

Once, news organizations spent years, if not decades, building up institutional credibility so that their viewers felt comfortable trusting them. Scott-Railton has had a week. “I’ve definitely taken a side,” he says. “I’m tweeting the voices of protestors. It’s not like I’m tweeting the police. But the tone I’m trying to take is not breathless. I’m trying to be careful — especially because the medium pushes you in the other direction.”

“Can you hold on a second?” Scott-Railton interrupts our interview to share another scrap of news. “I have people [in the Middle East] watching different news networks and feeding me information,” he says. And indeed not much more than a second later, it’s there on his Twitter feed: “Arabeya [sic]: Closure of Egyptian Rail #Egypt #Jan25.” In the language of the uninitiated, he’s told all those watching Twitter for news on the protests that the Dubai-based Al Arabiya news channel has just reported that country’s rail-lines have been shut down.

Since he first set up Jan25voices, Scott-Railton has expanded his efforts, recruiting partners in Egypt and around the Middle East to monitor what the Arab-language news channels are reporting. Sometimes he doesn’t just post the information he receives from a phone call, but also the call itself. One recording of a young Egyptian talking to him from inside the protests has been listened to more than 275,000 times. “The idea that I can reach out and take a person’s voice and help yield it up to that many people — I’m proud of that,” he says. “That’s really more interesting to me than my own voice.”