Zimpapers Logo

Mabasa Sasa : Sunday Mail Editor

AFTER a million tweets and WhatsApp messages, a thousand videos exhorting Diasporan Zimbabweans to show up, and scores of claims about a social media-led revolution, it all came down to this: a few bedraggled and clearly bemused individuals watching disinterested New Yorkers passing them by without a glance.That about sums up the totality of Evan Mawarire’s protests against President Mugabe and his Government at the 2016 United Nations General Assembly.

Mawarire had promised a turnout of nothing less spectacular than 5 000 people. They were to “embarrass” President Mugabe as he attended the 71st Session of the General Assembly, and call attention to the “crisis” in Zimbabwe.

Instead, it was to be a feast of humble pie.

On Monday, about 10 pro-Mawarire supporters showed up at Zimbabwe’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations, holding placards reading “Mugabe must go”.

Soon after they started blowing whistles and chanting anti-Zimbabwe slogans, a significantly larger group of pro-Zimbabwe activists — led by the ever-green men and women of the December 12 Movement — showed up and drowned out the rabble-rousers.

A lone New York Police Department officer had no difficulty in restraining the occasional pro-Mawarire demonstrator who, frustrated by the lack of traction and likely embarrassed by the abject turnout, tried to cross a line and confront the December 12 protesters.

As for Mawarire, the man himself was not there.

Instead, he was in an empty General Assembly hall with a supporter, taking selfies and posting them on social media while promising fireworks come Tuesday and Wednesday.

Tuesday was the day the UN General Assembly was to open.

The Zimbabwe delegation made it to the UN headquarters unmolested and without a squeak from the pro-Mawarire group.

But the man himself was to be found, after the General Assembly had opened, standing outside Zimbabwe’s Permanent Mission to the UN with his crew.

This time the turnout was to be slightly better — by a count of about three more individuals who were to similarly find themselves astounded by the sheer lack of interest in their Mawariree-led clause.

As with the first day, they resorted to hurling insults at December 12 pro-Zimbabwe activists (including scantily-clad and crude references to African-Americans as slaves) and at anyone entering the embassy building.

And again, the lone NYPD officer mostly sat nearby looking bored and only coming forward to caution any increasingly frustrated pro-Mawarire protester who could not understand why the wheels were coming off so quickly.

If warning was needed to Mawarire and associates that taking a bite out of the Big Apple was a bite too large, this was it.

But maybe it was too late. Promises had been made about the mother of all demonstrations come Wednesday — the day President Mugabe was to address the General Assembly as well as a High-Level Meeting of global leaders discussing weighty public health matters.

President Mugabe came, addressed and left.

The pro-Mawarire supporters were hard to locate within the locales of the UN headquarters, and where the motley pack were to gather, they were to be drowned by much larger, better organised protesters who were searing their vocal cause for one lost cause or another.

Perhaps Mawarire and crew can learn a lesson from the perennial protesters who crawl out of the Manhattan woodwork whenever September comes round: the people of New York are notoriously aloof and the delegates inside the UN headquarters have bigger issues to deal with than pastors without churches.

Or better yet, they could take heed of what the December 12 activists told them on Monday and Tuesday as the pro-Mawarire group floundered on the unforgiving pavements of a city more concerned about a terror attack in New Jersey on the eve of the General Assembly than about an anti-Zimbabwe protest outside a Zimbabwean embassy.

They told them, time and again, “Go back home and build Zimbabwe.”