The frenzy for presence on social media platforms by politicians as we approach the poll is fascinating as these folks apparently seek to ride on the back of Baba Jukwa’s popularity.

Yet the “short bursts” of information limited by a platform such as Twitter for some still cloaks ambitions to use social media space to replicate how it’s been harnessed in other countries, recalling of course that Obama’s first election into the White House is widely celebrated as being thanks to his campaign team’s use of social media platforms to reach out to younger voters.

For us here, only a while ago, Zanu PF’s Rugare Gumbo was bamboozled when asked about Baba Jukwa, responding that Zanu PF had no business being on Facebook!

Now Gumbo has changed his mind.

He says his party will use all platforms available, “everything that is there, we’re going to use,” Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and this is obviously informed by one of many recent reports.

Gumbo is no doubt a late convert, and this could indeed play against him as chief spokesperson, and also Zanu PF’s attempts to win over the youth vote, youths of course being purportedd to have a large social media presence in Zimbabwe.

But it is still curious that Zanu PF would require a World Wide Web-based campaign that targets that demographic considering the revolutionary party has long claimed disgruntled young unemployed urban youths – the born-frees the party calls them – have seen the light of British machinations as the cause of their suffering!

So why stalk them online, hmm? Or Zanu PF seeks new converts?

This youth vote has certainly been bagged going by the conflation of “urban grooves” and the Third Revolution where desperate youngsters took to the microphone to eulogise an aging politician as the source of their inspiration. Why hell, the youngsters even performed duets with the party’s political commissar slash Minister of Information! It doesn’t get any better than that surely.

Never mind that thousands of their colleagues have over the years been unable to graduate from university and polytechnics after failing to raise tuition fees and know pretty well the author of their misery.

And you should see some of the youths’ sentiments on these social media platforms Zanu PF is only embracing now.

I looked up some of the Zanu PF senior officials who are on Twitter for example and was tickled by the frugality of their “tweets.”

Years after the “invention of Twitter” a chap who fancies himself the epitome of propaganda only posted a couple of Tweets and went to sleep, surely now that a campaign for political survival is here, will these men and women be equal to the task? Or like everything else the power of social media will turn out to be nothing but misplaced hype as Zanu PF knows a better manual of “how to win an election”?

Would love to read one day that Zanu PF’s imminent loss of the 2013 election was saved by its use social media!

I am laughing already.

One of my favorite Zimbabwean bloggers, Takura Zhangazha, gives us a ten point guide to reading Zimbabwean Political Party Manifestos in 2013. Similar to the constitution, if you don’t read it, discuss it and question it, you’ll be a Rubber Stamper – yes, and who wants to be an RS? So uncool. Read Takura here, and download the manifestos from the Kubatana web site.

It’s shocking the number of people who say they have voted in all elections since 1980 but somehow find their names absent from the voter’s roll, and now these same people are faced with the prospect of not voting at all.

If ghosts can be found in the voters roll, it seems logical that the living can also be exorcised from the roll! And these stories are many.

Some are stories about people who want to vote but have no IDs, and efforts to get these important documents are being frustrated by all sorts of ridiculous red tape such as the person being told to bring parents, if parents are deceased, relatives with affidavits, if these relatives are buried deep in the rural areas, then that’s the end of it!

I watched a video of men and women yelling “they must tell us if they don’t want us to vote,” after trying for days to check their names and also register and couldn’t help must imagine that this is the kind of anger that is already known to exist by the people rushing the poll and their vote is as commonsense will have it, also already known how it will go!

It is thus increasingly becoming clear that many Zimbabweans will merely watch others exercise their franchise, and then we say bad governments are elected by people who don’t vote.

Now we know better: bad governments will make sure you don’t vote!

Sunday, 7 July
Midday, in Borrowdale village, a kombi pasted with election posters and filled with Zanu PF supporters did a drive around. A reminder to the elites that July might not be the month for sleeping easy.

Sunday, 7 July
In the afternoon on Enterprise Road a knot of Zanu PF supporters, one very visibly drunk, vociferous and pumped up in their new election regalia. Tshirts with slogans fade as do any election promises. Don’t they know that?

Wednesday, 10 July
Afternoon at the traffic circle in Newlands; a gathering of people, mostly women, with proceedings being officiated by some green caps with clipboards. Streams of people coming out of the police camp on their way to the gathering. New accommodation is being built for police staff and their families who live at the camp. Curious timing. Just enough built to give people hope that they’ll have some dignified living space but how long until the accommodation is completed?

“Clearly, like their ZANU PF leadership these people (war veterans who in 2000 led the violent land seizures) believed no black person was capable of standing up for him or herself unless propped by a white hand. It is ironic that Ian Smith during the Rhodesia era had also believed that Blacks were revolting because some white communists somewhere were prodding them. It is the story of our lives as black (first as Rhodesian) Zimbabweans that we were cursed with political leadership that viewed us as people with the brains of gnats and incapable of thinking for ourselves. Under Ian Smith, the Chinese and the Soviets were our puppet masters and today under Mugabe, the British and Americans are the new puppet masters.”
Grace Mutandwa (From her memoirs The Power and the Glory)

Zimbabwe Alert
From MISA

Wednesday, 10 July 2013
Journalist arrested while taking photographs

Police in Zimbabwe on Tuesday, 9 July 2013 arrested Leopold Munhende, a journalist with The Mirror, in the southern town of Masvingo. Munhende was arrested while taking photographs of the voter registration process at the Registrar General’s Offices.

The arrest came at a time when Zimbabweans were jostling to register as voters before the lapse of the deadline that had been set on the same day.

The incident took place around 09.20hrs (CAT) and the journalist was taken to Masvingo Central Police station where he was charged with being a public nuisance in terms of the Miscellaneous Offences Act.

More details to follow.

MISA-Zimbabwe