He has also used the intelligence services to sow divisions and maintain surveillance among the generals. Unless Mugabe’s opponents can develop a strategy to bring a decisive majority of senior military officers over to their side, even the most effective social media campaign will be for naught.
Then there is the other requirement of opposition success: a broad and inclusive political strategy. Hashtag activism and Facebook posts will never be a substitute for a well-crafted agenda; nor do they offer a successful alternative to on-the-ground political engagement.
In 2011, many Arab cyber-activists fulminated online against dictatorship and social ills (and in some cases helped to mobilize actual physical protests), but few managed to devise a workable and unifying political agenda for the morning after the collapse of the status quo.
Here the example of Egypt comes to mind once again. The military did not need long after Mubarak’s downfall to reassert its control over the political process; online activists had little to offer in the way of effective alternatives.
For these reasons it is not enough for Zimbabwe’s urban youth to simply oppose the status quo through social media. Let’s say that a successful youth uprising were to remove Mugabe from power tomorrow: Who would take over in his wake? What sort of political and economic agenda would this new leader have?
And where are the voices of Zimbabwe’s rural youth, who despite their numerical majority, have played a marginal role in online activism, since social media use is less widespread in the countryside?
Most of Zimbabwe’s social media activists have yet to give lucid answers to these important questions, while the few who do are plagued by a lack of consensus about who would lead a post-Mugabe Zimbabwe and what that leadership’s agenda should be.
If social media activists want to make a successful contribution to political change in Zimbabwe, they need to work in sync with traditional civil society groups and, crucially, effective opposition political parties.
But these two ingredients — an effective civil society and well-led opposition parties — are currently lacking.
The main opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, is being treated for colon cancer, sparking a succession struggle in his own party. A fully engaged Tsvangirai might have offered crucial leadership to urban youth in the recent protests.
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