I’m beginning to think that the term ‘empowerment’ is fancy NGO parlance for giving people permission to think for themselves. I went to the NGO Expo yesterday and I met a lot of NGO workers who appeared not to be ‘empowered’. It was a work assignment. So being ‘empowered’ by my NGO, I spoke to other NGOs about who Kubatana is and what we do. I should mention here that I do not labour under the title of Communication / Information and Advocacy Officer, I was merely doing my job as someone belonging to an organization: that is promoting its agenda and furthering its goals (ultimately that is the purpose of anyone’s job). Imagine my surprise, being an ‘empowered’ NGO worker, to find that other NGO workers were not as ‘empowered’ as I was, although they throw that particular term around like its free money.

I really don’t understand how some (not all, there were some organizations who had people that were very ‘empowered’) NGOs get on their soapboxes about ‘empowerment’ and fail to ‘empower’ their own people to speak to the media? Surely this is a basic marketing principle? The Expo is after all a marketing tool. I may not be very experienced in all things marketing, but I am familiar with the term Brand Ambassador, and with the principle of making every single person in an organization , from the Director to the cleaner, a Brand Ambassador. Making an organisations functionaries Brand Ambassadors means ensuring that every one knows what the organization is about, what it does, its hopes and aspirations for the future and more importantly why the existence of that organization is necessary. More than that, they are able (or shall we say ‘empowered’?) to speak to anyone at any time about it. Therefore, in an organization that believes enough in its own vision to invest in its people to do the same, anyone, Information Officer or not can answer basic questions about what their organizations does.

At one NGO, when I asked to interview to the Information Officer, she refused point blank to talk to me. At another, we spent most of what was a lovely afternoon trying to reach Head Office so we could get permission for an interview. I had spoken to the Information Officers earlier, who then gave me the run around. You might well wonder what sort of scary questions I was going ask that would elicit such reactions. They were simple: what issues that organization was currently focusing on; how the current political environment affected their work; how they (and here’s a key word), communicate with their constituencies; and the most controversial one of all: how they stay inspired in their work.

The NGO Expo was to give those NGOs who chose to exhibit an opportunity to get their issues out there. But they failed to ‘empower’ their Communication/ Information and Advocacy Officers to communicate to the public and media, and advocate their organizations objectives. So what exactly have they achieved by exhibiting? How are these organizations going to achieve their objectives, EVER, if their own people are poor representations of the organization? It seems to me that marketing is the least of their problems, and next year the money would be better spent in training their people to better represent their organization. I can’t really blame the functionaries for being afraid to speak out of turn. I blame the administrators and directors who create all the red tape in the first place. They are no better than government officials for having created such nonsensical rules for the dissemination of information.

There’s something that makes many people who don’t know me think that I am not a Zimbo upon first meeting me.

No, it’s not the Bohemian dressing and my propensity to mix colours that should otherwise never be assembled together within one outfit (although some say that that is why they think I am Jamaican/ Kenyan/ Brazilian etc.).

It is actually more about my jelly belly and all those other spongy bits on my body.

“Hawu sisi, but you can’t be a Zimbabwean,” a South African woman once argued as we rummaged through clothes in a boutique in Polokwane together. A few minutes before, she had tried to engage me in a conversation in Xhosa and I had politely informed her that I didn’t understand what she was saying.

And so she asked, “Are you Kenyan?”

“No,” I said.

“Mozambican, Malawian, American, Jamaican?”

“Zimbabwean,” I finally said to stop her from reciting all the nations on the global map.

But she didn’t believe me.

With a look at me from my head through my middle and then straight down to my toes, she concluded, “You are too healthy to be Zimbabwean.”

This was at the peak of the cholera epidemic when it seemed that the whole Zimbabwean population would be wiped out by the scourge.

And what she meant was that I was too fleshy, too bright-eyed and bushy-tailed to be coming from a collapsing country.

She is not the only one who has said this to me.

It seems everywhere I go, people have a perception that Zimbabwe is just a sorry pit in the ground infested with starvation and disease.

And why wouldn’t they? Any international news about us is all doom and gloom, horrifying statistics and depressing facts – no images of smiling healthy people.

So when you are the only Zimbabwean a person has had the opportunity to meet, the shock that yes, you do wear clean clothes, look well-fed and articulate – is all too much for them to bear. You should actually be half-way to dead and completely dejected.

Now that CNN, BBC and all the other foreign media stations have been allowed back into Zimbabwe, I truly hope that they will begin to beam messages of hope and happiness about this dear nation once more. One of my favourite sayings states that in the world, there is great suffering; but also great overcoming of it. That saying could have been written for the plight of Zimbabwe and its people.

I’ve just received SW Radio Africa’s latest text message with news headlines and updates:

Bob off to Libya, changes cabinet meet to Mon to stop MT chairing. MDC boycott. MDC Marange MP jailed before giving massacre details to conflict diamond group.

As usual, there’s a lot more than 160 characters worth of information packed into this SMS. But my overriding question from it is why does the MDC stay in this “power sharing” arrangement in which they are so clearly not just a junior partner, but a powerless pawn?

Hello Zimbabwe!

Soon Kubatana will be launching an audio magazine available over mobile phones and landlines. You add – we multiply! We’d like you to join the conversation and get talking and share your views on various topics. When we launch our audio magazine we’d like to launch it with You . . . members of our very broad and diverse network. So, how about leaving us your opinion on one of the following issues:

Africans are the most subservient people on earth when faced with force, intimidation, power.
Africa, all said and done, is a place where we grovel before leaders.
- Kenyan corruption buster, John Githongo

Facebook / Sexbook
Some people use Facebook to meet sexual partners. In the age of HIV, is this a smart or reckless way of using the Internet?

National healing begins, the newspaper headlines read. But politically motivated arrests and assaults are still happening. What should Zimbabwe’s reconciliation process look like – and are we ready for it?

Be heard: get your digits dialing . . . call +263 913 444 321-4 and give us your point of view. If you leave us a compelling message we might share it with the rest of Zimbabwe so please tell us your name and where you’re from.

The lines close at 4pm Friday 26th June.

If you are a boss, the next time you catch one of your staff members on Facebook, don’t be too brutal with them.

Facebook is actually not all that bad for your business.

That is, unless, your employees use the social marketing tool merely for catching up with long lost friends and chatting with relatives in the Diaspora about the situation back home in Zimbabwe. That would certainly qualify as gross abuse of office time.

But Facebook and business do actually mix.

Initially, Facebook (or ‘thefacebook’, as it was known then) was created as a tool for students attending Harvard University to keep track of one another. It was founded in 2004 by former Harvard student, Mark Zuckerberg, and later grew to allow even more educational institutions to be able to access the tool.  In 2005, ‘thefacebook’ was officially launched as Facebook. And in 2006, it was made freely accessible to those who were not members of educational institutions – that is, the global public.

And so what started as a simple university campus project has since sprouted to become one of the biggest global social networking fora. Regardless of nationality and bandwidth allowances, almost everyone is using FB – as it is affectionately known – as a way to stay in touch. And today, tens of millions of people around the world log on to Facebook to share news and information of all kinds.

So how does Facebook help your business?

Well, if many of your business contacts are registered users on Facebook, it can make keeping in touch with them much easier. With Facebook, you don’t need to know email addresses or any other contact details.  Once both you and the other user have confirmed each other as friends on Facebook, you gain easy access to one another – which means that you can compose and send mail which the other person will be notified of via their usual email address, or which they will see upon logging on to their Facebook account. This certainly saves time on trying to guess which email address a person may be using at a certain time.

Secondly, Facebook helps you to get back in touch with important contacts whom you might have lost track of. All you have to do is conduct a search by simply typing in the name of your contact. Facebook then aggregates all of its members that have the same name, or a similar name. Once you have found the right person, you send them a friend request, which is a formal request for that person to become your friend on Facebook. If that person accepts your friend request, you become able to see their details and information, and vice versa.

But even more important is the fact that on Facebook, members can create groups. If you want to, you can create a group for your organisation, company, advocacy campaign or cause. When creating the group, you can give some information about it so that users on Facebook can know whether or not they would like to join it.

So how, you might ask, will people find out about your group.

For me, this is really where the social aspect of Facebook becomes evident. If I join a group which a friend tells me about on Facebook, a notice will appear on my Facebook homepage – which is visible to all of my friends. If one of my friends sees this notice and is interested, they can also join the group. And this information will be visible to all of that person’s friends, who can then also join the group. So, a friend of a friend of a friend can find out something new just by the web of associations that Facebook allows. In addition, the administrator (or creator) of a group can send invitations to Facebook friends to join that group.

Personally, I think that it is a low-cost, efficient way of disseminating information.

And if a person joins a group, they will always receive notices of new information that the group might have posted. For instance, many Zimbabweans, and those around the world, joined a Facebook group called ‘Free Jestina’ in solidarity with the imprisoned human rights activist, Jestina Mukoko. And through this group, they received regular updates on her trial status, as well as any events being held in solidarity with her plight.

And as a fourth point, commercial and non-commercial entities are fast realising the potential that Facebook has to boost their profiles with the public. Just visit popular websites like BBC or the South African Mail and Guardian and scroll down some of the pages on offer. There, you will see the Facebook icon and words to the effect ‘Add to Facebook’, or a bookmark icon that will reveal the FB icon, among others, when clicked on. If you click on that icon and give your Facebook account details when prompted to do so, a small teaser and URL to that particular news story, audio or video clip will be added to your Facebook page.

But in order for your friends to see the whole article or clip, when they click on the same URL, they will be re-transferred to that very page on that particular website. And in effect what you, as the Facebook user, do is stimulate traffic on that website. And this is what any company or organisation with a website would like.

But of course, the utility of Facebook presupposes reliable and constant access to the Internet – something which is not uniform throughout Zimbabwe. And because of this, this social tool tends to skip a large portion of its key targets.

However, for those with regular access to the Internet, Facebook is well worth considering as a tool for effective marketing and communication. And rather than ban employees from using it, think of innovative ways of how they can use it to spread the word of your cause to their many friends around the world, who can then spread the message on to even more people.

You may call Facebook a waste of time. And I do agree that if a person spends the whole morning doing Facebook quizzes titled “What type of cheese are you?” or “Which Russian Princess are you?”, then that is of no use to anybody.  But I am still optimistic about FB and like to think of it as the spark that has the potential to start a good warm fire of information dissemination in our nation.

I’ve just finished Petina Gappah’s collection of short stories, An Elegy for Easterly.  In a recent interview with Emmanuel Sigauke, Gappah said “I think of my writing as a compulsive form of theft.”

You can see this clearly in Elegy for Easterly. The stories explore key issues in modern Zimbabwe – inflation, the Diaspora, family, relationships economic hardships. Each story has a different narrator – which enables these issues to be explored from a range of different angles, by a variety of voices. But, because the stories are all rooted in Zimbabwe – and therefore share a common background, some of the details overlap from one story to the next. A reference made in one part comes back from a different perspective in another.

I found Gappah’s book also gave a useful reminder of what we have lived through in the past few years. Just six months into dollarisation – and the concomitant stabilisation of prices and disappearance of inflation – and the confidence with which I counted trillions and quadrillions, and the ease with which I converted billion dollar prices into US dollar costs at an ever changing exchange rate is slipping. I can feel myself going soft. So it was interesting to read stories that so clearly drew on that period, and be reminded of those times.

But even as Gappah acknowledges the ways in which her own experiences, and others’ feed into her fiction, her stories are still that: stories, works of fiction.

So I was taken aback to read Richmore Tera’s scathing review of Gappah’s work in The Herald on 8 June. Gappah: Today’s Judas Iscariot, the article headlines. It goes on to dismiss Gappah as a running dog of the West, who “sold her soul, words and country to her Western paymasters, all for the proverbial 30 pieces of silver.”

“It is clear,” Tera writes, “that her only mission in the book was to blacken the image of the President.”

Well now. It’s unfortunate if some of what Gappah writes makes Tera uncomfortable on behalf of Zimbabwe’s President. But An Elegy for Easterly is clearly rooted in Zimbabwe. It shines a light not only on the country’s challenges but on its potential, its beauty, its language, its history, the promises of the liberation struggle and its culture and unique identity. How does this make Gappah a running dog of the West?

In her own blog entry commenting on this article, Gappah sheds a bit more light on the author, Richmore Tera, but even she seems confused as to where the vitriol is coming from.

Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai has been in the US this week, fundraising for Zimbabwe’s recovery. So far, he hasn’t scraped together nearly as much as he is looking for. But all the money in the world won’t help Zimbabwe if this is the kind of journalism that continues to fill the pages of our state newspaper.