What the condition of #KOT tells us about the state of dear Mother Africa

Until other Africans caught on, Kenyans were the second most active users of Twitter in Africa. AFP FILE PHOTO 

In Summary

• Following Kenyans on Twitter, or #KOT as they are more popularly known, the last year has been very different. On the whole, after the 2013 election, #KOT have, actually, become less angry. However, they have become more divided.
• Secondly, it considerably deradicalised electoral politics, with the result that though the 2013 vote seemed to have been bungled more than the December 2007 one that resulted in violence, it ended up in the court, not on the streets being settled with machetes and crossbars.
• The government was assailed for sleeping on the job. A trenchant narrative about State failure took hold, and an equally boisterous and outspoken narrative in defence of the State emerged. The middle ground collapsed.

By CHARLES ONYANGO-OBBO
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Give Kenyans things digital, and they will make a feast. M-Pesa was taken up with such zeal, nearly half of all mobile money transactions take place in Kenya. Until other Africans caught on, Kenyans were the second most active users of Twitter in Africa.

They have slid in the rankings, but probably remain the most vocal. One of the little-appreciated but very good things with this living-life-out-in-the-digital world is that a nation’s social media use is a free opinion poll about what it thinks and where its body is.

Following Kenyans on Twitter, or #KOT as they are more popularly known, the last year has been very different. On the whole, after the 2013 election, #KOT have, actually, become less angry. However, they have become more divided.

Looking back, the country’s best social media moment should have been its worst. Kenya hit the bottom of the pit after the 2008 post-election violence (PEV) in which more than 1,300 people were killed.

Two things, however, happened. One, the PEV also unleashed the most intense soul-searching the country had ever gone through in recent years and many people emerged from it with their heads in the right place.

It also produced an imperfect marriage, in the coalition government between former President Mwai Kibaki and former Prime Minister Raila Odinga. Many people did not like the coalition because it bickered too much, but those were the appearances. In reality, in terms of things like infrastructure, the coalition broke records in delivering.

'MKATE NUSU'

Also, the Raila side of the government always complained about being treated badly and being given crumbs as the Kibaki camp dined on the bread. But that, too, was rhetoric. As any child whose mother bakes (or any man whose partner does the same) knows, the cake is overrated. Most times the crumbs taste better than the cake.

The problem with the crumbs is that they are never enough, but no one should ever say they are not delicious. In any event, that dysfunctional Kibaki-Raila setup achieved two other things. First, it manufactured a sufficient level of elite consensus for Kenya to easily pass a fairly progressive constitution in 2010.

Secondly, it considerably deradicalised electoral politics, with the result that though the 2013 vote seemed to have been bungled more than the December 2007 one that resulted in violence, it ended up in the court, not on the streets being settled with machetes and crossbars.

The last three years of Kibaki were also the glory years of #KOT. Not so much in its fun moments, but in rallying as a country to take on the world. That was the heyday of the #SomeoneTellNigeria, #SomeoneTellBotswana hashtags, in which Kenyans on Twitter buried their differences and took down other countries in digital brawls.

It is instructive that for nearly two years now, there has not been any significant #SomeoneTell…campaign. There was a big come-together moment after the September 2013 attack on the Westgate mall by the Al-Shabaab militants, but as the siege ended, the recriminations started. The Kenya Defence Forces were denounced for allegedly looting the mall.

STATE FAILURE

The government was assailed for sleeping on the job. A trenchant narrative about State failure took hold, and an equally boisterous and outspoken narrative in defence of the State emerged. The middle ground collapsed.

Thus, during the terrorist attacks in Mandera at the end of 2014, and more recently at Garissa University College in which 148 Kenyans died, this divide and a level of indifference persisted. It was significant, for example, that barely two days after the attack, the English Premier League, and a big-bottom contest somewhere in Nakuru or those parts, were trending over the Garissa attack.

Kenya is not alone. In most of Africa, one observes this same listlessness. One way to read it is that there is a hunger for new big ideas that allow people to rise above the parochialism of their national politics and the dreariness of their daily lives. The new constitutions have been written and passed. The M-Pesas have been developed.

The terrorists have become a permanent fixture of life, and America is not going to elect a black man in the next election. Everywhere you look in Africa, people want to climb out of their holes. However, either they do not know how — or do not have someone to dig them out.

The author is editor of Mail & Guardian Africa. Twitter@cobbo