Fake plane accident or just attention seeking?
By Lance Guma
Something in the ZANU PF DNA is drawn to seeking attention. Robert Mugabe on Sunday created world headlines by telling the West to go to hell at the funeral of his sister Sabina at the Heroes Acre in Harare.
Ambassadors from those countries duly walked out. On Tuesday the Foreign Affairs Minister was fanning a diplomatic incident of sorts by summoning the diplomats and demanding an apology for the walk out….more headlines.
Hardly before those headlines had dried up Zimbabwe’s Civil Aviation boss catapulted the country back on the news map.
“I can confirm that a 767 plane coming from London has had an accident at Harare airport. I am not at the site, but there are just injuries, no deaths. I cannot name the airline involved or say more at this particular time. We are trying to establish what has caused the accident. We have set up an emergency help line desk to assist,” David Chawota told the media.
It was left to the Foreign Office in Britain to bring sanity to the situation and calm worried Zimbabweans, telling them that this was just a drill.
“As we understand it, it’s a drill, it isn’t real, it hasn’t really happened. We have got somebody on the way to the airport just to check. We have spoken to airport and air authorities and they say it’s a drill.”
Hours later embarrassed Zimbabwean aviation authorities came to their senses and confirmed it was just a drill. Their excuse – ‘they wanted to make the drill and emergency response seem more real.’
The next question is an obvious one. What happens when there is a real aviation disaster at the Harare International Airport? Response time will be much slower as everybody concerned will want to know if it’s the real thing? Aviation experts who spoke to Newsreel on Friday said a drill should involve only the emergency response groups that are needed.
Fooling the media into believing it’s an actual accident in the day and age of social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and other forms of communication technology would be suicidal for most countries.
Imagine if officials in New York lied to the media about a fake aircrash. The media would crucify them, and they’d be out of their jobs quicker than you could say….. Robert Mugabe. SW Radio Africa
