HomeOld_PostsFake news or fake knowledge in our children’s heads...what is worse?

Fake news or fake knowledge in our children’s heads…what is worse?

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By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

IT is rare for the ZANU PF Government and industry to agree on supposed causes of economic challenges in Zimbabwe.
On the immediate trigger of price-hikes and panic buying which gripped cities and towns toward the end of September 2017, there was this apparent elite class agreement, that gossip platforms on the internet were the trigger.
But from a media and society point of view, there is a much bigger challenge: “What is the governing party in ZANU PF teaching Zimbabwean youths?
What are all the other political parties teaching?
What are our universities teaching?
What does Parliament as the legislature teach?
What do all the mushrooming churches and faith-based organisations teach?
What does Government teach through all the channels and platforms at its disposal print, radio, television, seminars, state universities and rallies?
Why have we agreed with sellers of digital technologies that we live in the information age?
The knowledge age?
What kind of information age or knowledge age would be surprised by such an unwarranted panic based on mere rumours?”
If all that teaching – if it is indeed taking place can be dashed away within seconds and people start shooting themselves in the foot all over again the way they did in 2007-2009, of what use is all that teaching or information?
Should we not in fact, fear the fake knowledge filling the heads of our children, their teachers and political commissars more than we have been convinced lately to fear and blame faceless social media?
Seven years ago, the late Dr Vimbai Gukwe Chivaura, Professor Sheunesu Mupepereki and myself agreed to name our informal association Critical Information Network (CIN).
Our purpose was to develop programmes for television, radio, newspaper columns, seminars, conferences and indeed ‘social media’ platforms.
We believed we could add value to the outputs of both the ZBC and Zimbabwe Newspapers because in our humble view, there was need for these media houses to outsource local content on critical issues of national interest.
The output from our efforts has been reviewed by many, including Oxford University-based Dr Blessing Miles Tendi in his Making History in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe: Politics, Intellectuals and the Media.
The following were among the reasons why CIN members volunteered to intervene in media discourse:
Both ZTV and Zimbabwe Newspapers were overwhelmed by event-driven stories and controversies and lacked value-driven, overarching and underpinning programmes and columns to anchor their work in the national context.
Too many features were downloaded or borrowed from foreign sources which were not solidly grounded in our own history and society.
– The urban bias was always palpable, often quite embarrassing, especially in economic reporting.
– Value-based, over-arching and theme-driven programmes, columns or series were the means through which these media outlets could make sense of event-driven stories and controversies and be able to help their audiences and readers to anchor their reception or reading, and to see how the particular stories, events and issues were connected and relevant to the people.
– Both ZTV and Zimbabwe Newspapers did not provide adequate background research for journalists tasked with interviewing politicians and so-called professionals, experts, academics and intellectuals. The journalist, host or anchor person often just let the guest(s) talk without being able to correct or challenge wrong information, distortions or inaccuracies and often without being able to depart from prepared questions and to ask really productive follow-up questions to the guest’s answers.
– Research findings by the Zimbabwe All Media Products Survey (ZAMPS) were often accepted without being scrutinised for obvious biases.
– Reporters lacked in-depth knowledge and media research experience to challenge assumptions behind ZAMPS conclusions.
In order to reduce the event-driven and gossip-driven solipsism which is represented by the recent panic in the cities, we said we should try to adopt the following objectives:
– To teach our youths through radio, television, books and magazines that we as Zimbabweans owe our existence only to God, to our ancestors and to the heroes and heroines who liberated this nation from imperialism and settlerism.
– We do not exist because of Britain, the US or Europe; and we do not exist to be measured against imported benchmarks or to fulfill a so-called ‘Democracy Project’ or ‘reform programme’ invited form outside. We occupy our land and own its minerals and natural resources only because of Chimurenga and by the grace of God the Creator.
– To teach young people through radio, television, books and magazines that the heroes and heroines who liberated this country succeeded because of the shared values of love for one’s own people, because of solidarity and internationalism which motivated the Frontline States, the then Organisation of African Unity (now African Union), the Non-Aligned Movement, the Chinese, the Cubans, Russians and others to come to our assistance and defence.
– To teach our youths that it is necessary today as it was necessary 30 to 50 years ago to distinguish true patriots and revolutionaries from loud and flashy pretenders who sing slogans with us by the day while collaborating with looters, corruptors and illegal regime change hyenas by night.
– To compensate for the intellectual and ideological bankruptcy of our institutions of higher learning (whose debasement has been worsened through illegal sanctions and economic sabotage) by putting together highly researched and well-presented need-to-know programmes which focus on cultivating the pleasure of imparting knowledge for national self-defence without name calling, without insults, without bitterness and without the need to lie.
Such programmes would set the proper context for real national unity, true national reconciliation, economic indigenisation, economic empowerment and real innovation in defence of our sovereignty.
– To teach our youths that, having reclaimed and re-occupied our land space, we now must move to re-occupy our minds, our digital platforms, our libraries and studios with ideas that help to enhance our own aspirations and build our pride in ourselves.

The books, articles and programmes we create must be made available for further distribution and regular use. Therefore, Parliament needed to vote budgets which would be used to cushion our national media against pandering to the highest commercial bidder and advertiser to the detriment of our youths.
Our assumption was that there was not much we could do to prevent gnats, flies and other hostile creatures from polluting our children’s glasses and jars of water, milk and honey.
But all of us parents, schools, universities, newspapers, magazines, radio stations, TV stations, websites, churches and platforms belonging to political parties, parliament, chiefs and groups of educators, mentors and elders all of us, could ensure that our children knew what flies, cockroaches, bugs and other disease carriers were and that they knew how to keep them out of their saucers, plates and jars of honey, milk, water and porridge.
The fake knowledge and false information already lodged in our children’s heads would be more deadly than the contents of all the fake news outlets from inside and outside the country.
We repeatedly cited the example of how the popular conscientisation of the people of Zimbabwe against settlerism, apartheid and imperialism defeated the Rhodesian propaganda machine which was fully backed by South African media and fortified by the umbrella of impunity offered through the Western Cold War posture of aggression against all revolutions and revolutionaries.
Julie Fredrickse, as a foreign journalist stationed here during the liberation war, documented that life-and-death struggle in None But Ourselves: Masses Versus Media in the Making of Zimbabwe.
The mass consciousness which made possible the defeat of such a huge global onslaught on Zimbabwe is clearly despised by the current money-chasing elites and their cash-crazy cohorts of youths because not much revolutionary teaching is going on and much of the content has been thrown out even from established media houses, to be replaced by the selling and marketing of everything including false prophets and political charlatans.
Therefore, the recent price hikes and subsequent panic buying reflected the criminal neglect of real knowledge by our institutions which has left young people hopelessly vulnerable to fly-by-night purveyors of rumour and lies.
No amount of banning, censorship or regulation can substitute for public education enabling young people to defend themselves intellectually, psychologically and spiritually.
The freedom fighters who defeated Rhodesian, South African and Western propaganda in Julie Fredrickse’s book were also youths at the time.
But their minds had been trained and educated differently from today’s youths.
In future instalments, I shall give examples of the knowledge we have neglected to teach our children.
For instance, where is our own researched explanation of the financial crisis of 2007-2009?
That crisis by now should have become part and parcel of our living history.
Do the young people confusing speculation and ‘money burning’ with entrepreneurship know our living history of the years 1990 to date?
What did we learn from the problems of those years?
In a book called Power, Crime and Mystification, Stephen Box explained that most ordinary people find it difficult to recognise corporate crime let alone to fight it with certainty and confidence.
Box wrote, thus:
“Corporate crime is rendered invisible by its complex and sophisticated planning and execution, by non-existent or weak law enforcement and prosecution, and by lenient legal and social sanctions which fail to reaffirm or reinforce collective (majority) sentiments on moral boundaries.”
In addition, the type of media to which the majority of people expose themselves under-reports corporate crime.
It is important to note that, even when the businesspeople accept that they have contributed to the current economic problems, they will first blame the State and then downplay the significance of their own behaviour.
This mystification of criminal behaviour is most obvious in the tendency to delete the customer or consumer.
Here is one skewed admission by the late businessman Erich Bloch in The Zimbabwe Independent of March 30 2007.
“Since the beginning of February (2007), much of commerce and industry has been pursuing operations in a manner that can only hasten the Zimbabwean economic collapse.
The captains of business…are apparently now driven to pursue self-destruction or, in other words, to commit hara-kiri, but to do so with the same philosophy as suicide bombers, being to destroy not only themselves, but also all others … ever greater numbers of industrialists, wholesalers and retailers abandoned the traditional approach of determining selling prices by aggregating direct costs of goods produced, the proportion of operational costs as attributable to the sale of such goods, and the desired profit margin.
Instead they have resorted to calculations based on anticipated replacement costs, plus a forecast inflation-adjusted profit margin.”
This is an admission by one businessman that his colleagues decided to become prophets and seers whose main survival strategy now rests on guessing what inflation should or will be next year and the year after.
Yet anyone with some elementary social science knowledge and history would notice two things which make the whole exercise foolish:
First, all the seers want to see only skyrocketing inflation.
None of them is calculating downwards.
Second, the effect of the majority or all of the so-called captains of business calculating future inflation upwards and only upwards merely creates a situation of self-fulfilling prophecy and makes the businessman himself the key driver of that inflation in unison with all his colleagues and all the saboteurs.
In other words, there can be no hope of ever bringing the inflation down in such a scenario.
The on-going speculation and price escalation means that the so-called ‘young entrepreneurs’ have learned nothing from recent history because their parents, mentors and elders have neglected or failed to understand that history.

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