[kictanet] Interesting that it's foreign journalists sharing these stories rather than our locals

[Brian Munyao Longwe]

Geeks for PeaceBy MICHELA
WRONG<http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/author/michela-wrong/>
Michela Wrong

NAIROBI — In a tower block overlooking the leafy Nairobi suburb of
Kilimani, nine Kenyans sit at computer screens, silently trawling Web
sites, blogs, tweets and Facebook conversations.

This could almost be an upmarket Internet café, only it’s far too quiet and
no one is surreptitiously watching hard-core porn. But what’s going on in
the iHub has its own element of titillation.
LATITUDEThe Campaign for Kenya

A series about the country’s first general election under its new
Constitution.

   - More from this
series»<http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/author/michela-wrong/>

The youngsters on the second floor are scanning Kenya’s online media for
“dangerous speech”: phrases likely to foster paranoia, distrust, hatred and
violence in the run-up to next week’s election. They work for the
monitoring group
Umati<http://www.ihub.co.ke/blog/2013/02/phase-1-oct-2012-jan-2013-umati-report-released/>
 and are part of a multi-strand high-tech attempt, much of it by
volunteers, to ensure that Kenya doesn’t come tothe brink of civil
war<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1574179/Kenya-on-the-brink-of-civil-war.html>
 as it did after its last election, in 2007.

Working in five vernacular languages, Swahili and English, they are on the
alert, in particular, for terms that reduce entire ethnic groups to the
status of animals. “Cockroaches,” a favorite during Rwanda’s genocide, is
also popular here. So are “worms,” “rats,” “vermin” and “jiggers” — a
reference to a parasite that burrows under toenails.

“The phrases are intended to hit you in the gut, and they do,” says Angela
Crandall, research manager for Umati.

Eighty percent of the inflammatory rants, Crandall says, occur on Facebook,
and most of the authors make no attempt to conceal their identities. This
suggests they are naive or cocky and believe there will never be any legal
consequence for what they write — which probably is correct.

Umati feeds its findings to Uchaguzi <https://uchaguzi.co.ke/> (Swahili for
“election”), one floor below, where even more computer geeks tap at
keyboards, fuelling themselves with espressos. Uchaguzi has prepared a
Web-based, crowd-sourced map of Kenya that, starting this weekend, will
track thousands of SMS messages, tweets, phone calls and emails from
members of the public, civil society activists, election monitors and local
officials, to build a picture of what is happening across the country.
Uchaguzi has established a network of partnerships with grassroots
organizations so that, anticipating trouble, it can send them warnings to
prevent any escalation.

“The partnerships are the key,” Daudi Were, one of the group’s founders,
explained. He described how during the referendum on the Constitution in
2010, Uchaguzi had received a message about a group of young men with
machetes gathering outside a polling station in Molo, a town in the Rift
Valley.

“Fifteen minutes later, although we are 200 kilometers away, two lorries of
police drove up. That was because we had passed the information on to a
local joint peace initiative with links to the security forces.”

The geeks in the iHub — urban, hyper-educated and distinctly Western in
their outlook — and their methods represent a generational challenge to an
electoral system that feels sclerotic and stuck in the past, despite a new
Constitution that reconfigures state structures.

The main presidential candidates — Raila Odinga and Uhuru Kenyatta — are
the sons of two men who dominated Kenyan politics in the
1960s<http://www.statehousekenya.go.ke/hist/1960.htm>.
Most of the candidates vying for lower posts are wearyingly familiar.

On parking lots and street corners in Nairobi, politics is done the
old-fashioned way. Men bark orders at mustered volunteers, doling out
T-shirts, caps and cash payments. In rural areas, where Kenya’s destiny has
usually been decided, politics also dominates a sense of routine, with
villagers meekly waiting to be told by tribal elders who to vote for.

I left the iHub thinking that Kenya is clearly teetering on the cusp of
change but that real transformation still depends on massive structural
repairs entirely beyond the reach of those Internet activists.

As Were readily admits, preventing violence in Molo depended in the last
resort on the intervention of the Kenyan police, a force renowned for its
venality and political
partisanship<http://www.nation.co.ke/News/Kenya-Police-most-corrupt-institution/-/1056/962512/-/cj4a1cz/-/index.html>.
“We can’t compel organizations to act. We can support institutions, but we
can’t replace them.”

It’s the dilemma that confronts every aid organization: No matter how
dysfunctional, the state can rarely be bypassed.
------------------------------
*

Michela Wrong has covered Africa for nearly two decades, reporting for
Reuters, the BBC and The Financial Times. She is the author of “It’s Our
Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistleblower.”
*
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