OLIVER METH | March and March’s Facebook war is raising bigger questions

Share current article via EmailShare current article via FacebookShare current article via TwitterShare current article via LinkedInOliver MethEnter fullscreen mode displaying this image.ExpandMen take to the streets of Durban on September 30 for a “Day of Action” organised by SA First Forum and “March and March”, calling for mobilisation against gender-based violence and femicide (GBVF). The initiative seeks to put men at the forefront of the fight against violence against women and children. Photo: SANDILE NDLOVU Story audio is generated using AI

There is a point in every political argument when you have to stop asking who is winning the Facebook fight and start asking why the fight is happening in public in the first place.

That is where I find myself with the increasingly ugly social media fallout involving March and March leader Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma, her husband Xolani Zuma, who also provides legal counsel to the group, and Nkosikhona “Phakel’umthakathi” Ndabandaba — and the questions now swirling around what happened after the movement’s June 30 mobilisation and the subsequent meeting in Umhlanga.

Because, honestly, this is no longer just about people swearing at each other on Facebook. There is a much bigger political and communications story underneath it, and the longer the public is left to reconstruct that story from posts, comments and screenshots, the more damage is being done to a movement that has built much of its influence on precisely those same platforms.

It starts with a post, then comes a response, then another response, and before long the language becomes personal, the cultural insults start flying and people who were nowhere near the room are trying to work out what actually happened from competing versions of events. Suddenly, the question is no longer what March and March is fighting for — the fight itself becomes the story.

And that is a serious problem for any political movement.

March and March has understood the power of direct communication better than most emerging political formations, using social media to bypass traditional media, mobilise people and turn a Facebook post into a national conversation, while Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma has built a recognisable public profile by speaking directly to her followers without waiting for traditional political institutions or journalists to interpret her message.

But there is a catch: the same social-media machine that builds political power can very quickly expose political disorder.

That is what appears to be happening now. Facebook posts by Xolani Zuma responding to the controversy show and indicate that March and March would issue a formal statement explaining what was discussed at the post-June 30 Umhlanga meeting. That matters, because it confirms that there was a meeting and that there were discussions significant enough to warrant an organisational explanation.

Secrecy does not automatically mean wrongdoing, but unexplained secrecy creates suspicion, particularly when an organisation has built its political identity around demanding answers, transparency and accountability from government.

The problem is that the explanation did not appear to come before the controversy. The public encountered Facebook first. And Facebook is a terrible place to leave a vacuum, because once information starts emerging through personal posts, the organisation loses control of the chronology, the context and eventually the narrative itself.

This is where March and March should have been much more transparent from the beginning. If the Umhlanga meeting was legitimate, explain it. If it was strategic, explain it. If particular people were involved, explain the nature of those discussions. If there was disagreement afterwards, explain that too.

Secrecy does not automatically mean wrongdoing, but unexplained secrecy creates suspicion, particularly when an organisation has built its political identity around demanding answers, transparency and accountability from government.

Jacinta and Xolani cannot spend their political life telling the government that ordinary South Africans deserve answers and then become strangely quiet when people start asking what happened inside their own political house. That is the communications contradiction, but it is also a leadership problem.

The exchanges involving Ngobese-Zuma, Xolani Zuma and Phakel’umthakathi have moved beyond political disagreement into deeply personal territory, with culturally loaded language, swearing and arguments about respect, women, masculinity, family and who has the right to call out whom.

For somebody looking at this from outside South Africa, it may simply look like people fighting online, but our language and cultural references can carry a much heavier political and personal charge than that. When somebody’s masculinity, family, womanhood or cultural standing is dragged into an argument, the attack is no longer merely about a policy position or a meeting — it is an attack on social legitimacy, honour and reputation.

And once that happens publicly, in front of thousands of followers, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to pull the conversation back to the original issue.

The question stops being, “What actually happened in Umhlanga?” and becomes, “Who insulted whom?”, “Who disrespected whose family?”, “Who is loyal to whom?” and “Who is behaving like a real man?”

That is how a political movement loses control of its own story.

But I think we should be even more critical than that. This is not simply an unfortunate communications mishap. It raises questions about the kind of political culture developing inside March and March, where personalities, personal loyalties and public feuds can begin to overshadow the political programme that brought people into the streets in the first place.

A movement cannot become so consumed by the personalities at its centre that ordinary supporters are left trying to decode internal politics through Facebook.

From a communications perspective, the first rule of a crisis is simple: if you do not tell your story, somebody else will.

March and March knows this better than most. It has demonstrated repeatedly that it understands how quickly a social-media narrative can mobilise people, create outrage and force institutions to respond, so it should also understand the other side of that equation: if you leave a gap in the public narrative, people will fill it.

That is why the Umhlanga meeting should have been dealt with proactively, not because every political meeting needs to be livestreamed or activists are not entitled to private conversations, but because the moment the meeting became politically relevant, the organisation needed to own the explanation.

Instead, the public is now watching people connected to the movement fight publicly while waiting for the formal explanation that should have provided the context in the first place.

That is backwards and there is a bigger reputational risk here.

We are watching, including journalists, political opponents, supporters and ordinary South Africans who may not care about the personalities involved but are asking a very simple question: what the hell is going on?

We need to know who is speaking for March and March, whether a post is personal or organisational, what the Umhlanga meeting was about, who was involved, what was discussed and whether anything was agreed.

In fact, they are exactly the sort of questions March and March has spent months demanding that the government answer. So perhaps this is the moment for the movement to apply its own politics of accountability inward.

A movement that demands accountability from everyone else cannot afford to become allergic to accountability when the questions turn inward.

Because there is a difference between being transparent and being exposed.

Transparency is when you tell people what happened and being exposed is when somebody else tells them first. And right now, March and March risks finding itself in the second category.

The irony is that whatever one thinks of March and March’s politics, the questions it has raised about migration, government accountability and policing are serious questions that deserve serious political debate.

But March and March cannot allow their own Facebook fights to become bigger than the politics they claim to represent.

Perhaps the uncomfortable question March and March needs to confront is not who won the Facebook argument, but whether the movement is becoming too invested in the personalities at its centre and not nearly disciplined enough about the politics it claims to represent.

Movements do not belong to their leaders, they belong to the people they claim to mobilise and at some point, somebody has to put the phone down, stop responding, stop swearing and stop feeding the algorithm and start explaining.

The public does not need another Facebook fight. We simply need to know what happened in Umhlanga.

Until March and March properly explains that, every new post, insult and screenshot will simply make the original question louder, around what they are not telling us!

Oliver Meth is a development and political communications strategist

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