It was an iconic moment, one that visually summed up how an instantaneous and ubiquitous media limits officialdom’s space for obfuscation, distortion and lying. Spin is getting harder.
Muammar Gaddafi’s information chief, Moussa Ibrahim, was on Sunday addressing a captivate audience of international journalists. Literally captive, since they were confined to Tripoli’s Hotel Rix, allowed to move about the city on the infrequent whim of the regime and only then with a phalanx of minders.
Ibrahim was rubbishing media reports that Tripoli was about to succumb to the rebel onslaught. He was explaining that the city was impregnable because Great Brother Leader was so loved by his people when the television screen suddenly split.
One half showed the propagandist’s eloquent and condescending soliloquy. On the other unspooled live footage of a Sky correspondent entering Tripoli with the unhindered rebel column, the city’s residents exultantly embracing their liberators, weeping, cheering and thanking Allah.
Governments and political movements have always fibbed about such things in order to prop up morale, or to buy time to manoeuvre, or because denying reality is just in their DNA. The flipside in Libya was the assertion by rebel leaders that three of Gaddafi’s sons had been captured, only for one of them to stroll into the Rix during the course of the following day.
Previously such propagandists could hope to get away with lies, at least for a while. Now, even with the entire media under martial law, anyone with a cellphone camera can instantaneously and indisputably repudiate as it is uttered, the official version.
Despots, surrounded as they are with sycophants, always hopelessly overestimate the regard in which their subjects hold them. Gadaffi and Ibrahim will be flabbergasted at how meaningless the pledges of fealty and promises of sacrifice have proved to be.
Ibrahim told the media that the ordinary people would turn Libya into a “burning volcano and a fire under the feet of the invaders”. Gadaffi himself often boasted of the adoration in which he was held by his countrymen and of their willingness to die to protect his 42-year rule against the “rats”.
But there were no martyrs in evidence when the tipping point came. Most Tripoli residents welcomed his exit and will jettison Gaddafi’s eccentric philosophy of life and government, his ‘Third International Theory’ with alacrity.
In all, the once cosy world of African despots is becoming fraught. Not only has new media made it impossible to hide dissent and dissatisfaction but the International Criminal Court (ICC) has made it more difficult to find a comfortable abode when the rogue leader is eventually deposed.
Despite Gaddafi’s pledge to die rather than go into exile, when the moment of choice arrives, the smart money will be on self preservation. Egomaniacs base their entire existence on being indispensable, not dead.
Given his Pan-Africanist credentials, which culminated in his coronation in 2008 as “King of Kings of Africa”, a deposed Gaddafi can hope for asylum in one of only a couple of dozen countries. These are the minority of nations on the continent that have not signed the treaty that established the ICC, which is seeking his arrest.
The most likely are Angola or Zimbabwe, both of which have reportedly offered him asylum. Since another deposed dictator, the genocidal Mengistu Haile Mariam, is already receiving asylum from Robert Mugabe, South Africans may soon be getting another murderous neighbour.
Given African National Congress Youth League leader Julius Malema’s current political woes and his admiration of Uncle Bob, maybe this is the moment for President Jacob Zuma to negotiate a two-for-the-price-of-one deal with Mugs.
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