When the President joined Twitter back in 2017, many of us were quite relieved at the prospect of a president who isn’t a dinosaur. Put together with the President’s statements on embracing technology many were really excited at the prospects of a tech revival in the country. So far, this is yet to come to fruition and over the past few weeks, we have seen quite an alarming series of actions and approach towards tech by the government which goes contrary to this.
Most recently, George Charamba came out and announced that people should not believe everything that comes from the President’s account. Speaking to journalists the spokesperson said:
Just when we were in there, the President was drawing my attention to an attempt to as it were, to put words into his mouth using his Twitter account. So, don’t always believe that which is coming through…
VIDEO: George Charamba telling reporters to "not always believe that which is coming through" Emmerson Mnangagwa's Twitter account. ZimLive has been told that Mnangagwa's son, Emmerson Dambudzo Junior, is the fingers behind the account pic.twitter.com/lJGrNniwok
— ZimLive (@zimlive) January 24, 2019
Obviously, the President’s Twitter account is managed by someone else but this statement seems to suggest that whoever is doing so can tweet whatever they want to tweet, which is a bit strange. This is one of the channels that the President has used for official communications and now it makes it hard to know what comes from the account and is true and what’s false.
