Digital loudhailers

Student protests helped end apartheid. Now the youth are back, to demand an education. Ironies abound as tweets fly

ast week’s #FeesMustFall protests, which came to a climax outside parliament and the Union Buildings, have quickly been compared to the Arab Spring — especially because of the use of social media.

“The revolution will be tweeted,” was proclaimed nearly as often. Such pronouncements are regular whenever there are protests. But what makes last week’s events different is not just that people used social media to make sure the students had sufficient food and water. They also set up ways to buy students data for their phones and other mobile devices, so they could stay in touch and carry on tweeting.

Last Wednesday, finance minister Nhlanhla Nene pretended that nothing was amiss when he presented his mediumterm budget policy statement, despite the students protesting outside parliament.

It was another Marikana for SA, though thankfully a lot less bloody. Citizens were barred from entering parliament, then chased away by police using riot shields and stun grenades. Some of those arrested were charged

Lwith “high treason”. The latter charge was quickly denied by police but images of the charge sheets spread on social media as fast as the state’s denials.

Social media played a key role in the organisation of the protests, but it was also used for pictures showing students clearing up after demonstrations, or studying together. Using Twitter like a digital loudhailer, some tweets called the media to where confrontations with police were happening.

All this must be what was heralded as “citizen journalism” when blogs and smartphones began appearing, but has seldom lived up to its potential.

Until now. Until social media became the way the world communicates, and now that Twitter is living up to its hype as “the front page of news”.

It seemed like Nelson Mandela’s prescient comment in 1993 was made for this moment: “If the ANC does to you what the apartheid government did to you, then you must do to the ANC what you did to the apartheid government.”

Young people have arguably been the biggest losers in the list of those who were promised