Video: Save Our Scorpions submissions to Parliament

The upshot of our ‘Save Our Scorpions’ viral campaign: 2000 written submissions and 98000 signatures on the various petitions (online, sms and hardcopy). Here’s a video clip of DA safety and security spokesperson Dianne Kohler Barnard handing them over at the Portfolio Committee on Safety and Security:

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As IOL reports, this follows a number of recent polls suggesting that support for the retention of the Scorpions is high.  

‘Save our Scorpions’ – a successful viral campaign

A few weeks ago, I wrote about citizen activism 2.0, highlighting two civil society initiatives taking their campaigns online – one on Eskom load shedding and the other on the Scorpions. I’ve already written about our new load shedding blog, but I wanted to provide an update on how we’ve joined the conversation about the dissolution of the Scorpions (rather than just starting our own).

The online petition to stop the government from disbanding the Scorpions was started by self-proclaimed concerned citizen Hugh Glenister.

His petition details included a quote from DA leader Helen Zille, which is great for the DA. However, after three weeks, he only had a handful of signatures. We had been in touch with Hugh to thank him for using the quote, and we then approached him to assist with marketing it, and last week we introduced a viral email into our network of contacts.

Citizen Activism 2.0 – Eskom and the Scorpions

The DA often comes up with ideas for initiatives (not only online) around issues and concerns that are at the forefront of the public’s attention. For example, we launched Victims of Crime at a time when crime was very much in people’s mind’s eye – shortly after some very high profile murders (a concern still very prominent in the public mind).

We don’t always think of those ideas first, though.

This week, trade union Solidarity launched Eskom Stories – a platform for people to share their experience of Eskom’s incapacity, to vent and perhaps offer suggestions about how to ameliorate the situation.