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NOTHING TO CELEBRATE ABOUT POLITICAL SOCIAL MEDIA HATE

25/04/2020 22:38:00 By Maqhawe Nxumalo

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To paraphrase Steve Buscemi’s character in the movie ‘Con Air’; Define irony?
Irony is a bunch of EmaSwati being free enough to go on social media to criticise the country’s leadership, system of governance and proclaim how ‘unfree’ they are, and then facing absolutely no blowback from the same state they are accusing of undemocratic and oppressive rule.

It must really be nice.

You know, back in the day – at the turn of the century, to be precise – many of us could only wish for a time like this for our country.
At the time our country was being battered from all angles with a lot of negative, false and humiliating news reports from the international media.
Bored and lazy journalists the world over knew that we were a soft target and they always went to town inventing stories and mocking our monarch, culture and system of governance.

desperate journalists

Incompetent and desperate journalists from South Africa picked up gossip and vitriol from the dark dungeons in Johannesburg, which were the hang outs for bitter Eswatini layabouts masquerading as politicians in exile and published it as fact.

We were the perennial victims of fake news many years before President Donald Trump made the phrase popular.
And at the time the country did not even have the office of government spokesperson.

At the height of these insane attacks, I remember very well how at pains King Mswati III was as he spoke to a small group of us at Ludzidzini Royal Residence, saying that the attacks were so devoid of sense that hiring a royal spokesperson would not have served any good because his side of the story would always be twisted and presented negatively.

Among those present during that one-of-a-kind meeting with the King were Eswatini journalism legends Phinda Zwane and Phiwokwakhe Ngidi; both of whom are, unfortunately, now late. Also, in attendance was Brian Mohammed who, today, can stand as my witness as he is still very much alive and well at his beloved Msunduza Location.
I am not digressing.

out of control

I am recounting all this because I want it to be very clear that things were bad and totally out of control. The country’s image was taking a beating.
As patriots we felt battered and bloodied, but our heads remained unbowed – to commit sacrilege and paraphrase William Ernest Henley’s ‘Invictus’.
We wished for one thing. One thing only.

We wished there could be a way for us as individual, ordinary citizens, to speak to the world and give it an accurate picture of who we really are as emaSwati and what we are about. We wanted the world to know how we felt about the monarchy they claimed was unwanted; we wanted the world to know what we thought of the Tinkhundla system they alleged was undemocratic; and we wanted the whole world to know how insulted we felt when they misrepresented our culture and sexualised Umhlanga Reed Dance and when they referred to certain cultural practices as forced labour.

no platforms

We wanted to give the world lessons on our way of life but, alas, there were no platforms to do so.
That was life pre-social media.
Fast forward 20 years, the world is a completely different place when it comes to information sharing and broadcasting.
In this era of social media, any liSwati with a gadget and internet connection can tell the Eswatini story.

Boy, how I wish we had all these platforms in 1998 when I was still young and very radical in my politics!
I, and many other patriots, would have gone to bat for this country in a very big way. Most of the disdainful and false reports about the country would have been ‘returned to sender’ chop chop.

It kills me today to see emaSwati failing to appreciate the power of these platforms, and utilising them solely as a tool to get likes and feel better about themselves.

A section of emaSwati know only to log into these mediums to crassly criticise and attack the authorities on issues that they barely comprehend, and, in the process, expose themselves to be – what Julius Malema calls – lazy thinkers.

Being loud and disrespectful on social media does not impress me. We should not applaud such displays of underlying mental health issues.

expressing my politics
When I started expressing my politics in this very publication on April 5, 1998, I did it the old school way. Every week I would put pen to pages of paper to produce 1500 words, which would only be read by several thousands of people who would get hold of a hard copy of the newspaper that week.
Today anyone of us can potentially reach hundreds of millions of people with one tweet. That is a maximum of 280 characters.

That is the power of these platforms which some of us see fit to use to only perpetrate and perpetuate - what Julius Malema again calls self-hate.
Why are emaSwati on social media normalising – and even celebrating – the act of going into these platforms to spread lies and hate about your own country?
The truth is something else. Today we are addressing the lies and hate.

A village idiot somewhere can wake up one morning, invent a juicy piece of scandal about our leaders, post it on social media and immediately get a lot of adulation.

But really now, how sad, empty and hate filled must your life be for you to purse your lips and viciously attack the King and his children on social media, falsely accusing them of all sorts of heinous things?
What mental health issues are you dealing with to view this as some kind of sport that calls for your applause?
For that is the other thing.

The people who like, share and retweet this madness are just as guilty as the twisted authors.
How ‘unintelligent’ must you be to believe social media posts – sans any evidence whatsoever- stating that government is doctoring and/or underreporting the results from the Covid-19 tests?

People really need to find other ways of trying to be relevant.
Now we have this guy – whom I refuse to call a journalist – in hiding because of fabricating and publishing lies about the King and covid-19.

being persecuted

To some on social media, he is now a victim being persecuted by the State. Come on, for crying out loud!
King Sobhuza II hit the nail firmly on the head when he said ‘EmaSwati ayabusa’ (EmaSwati have it easy).
In most countries of the world at this time, the guy I was talking about in the paragraph above would have faced worse than what he is facing here.
That is the fuller extent of the irony of this whole sad tale; the international audience is smart enough to know that real oppressed people would not be posting such rubbish about their leaders and living to see the next dawn. Only a democracy suffers such fools gladly in its citizenry.

So next time as you sit down to post your negative delusions about the King or the prime minister, know that by doing that you are actually demonstrating to the world that you are living in one of the real democracies on earth and you are led by benevolent leaders who understand and protect the rights of all their people, even those who disagree with them.