African governments’ growing urge to control social media

When Yoweri Museveni was about to be sworn in as Uganda’s president on 12 May 2016, his government ordered that telecommunication companies block the use of Twitter, WhatsApp and Facebook. This was a predictable reaction. Forget Kizza Besigye for a minute; some of the most vehement opposition to the way the election had been conducted was coming from social media. And so the government, despite public outcry, blocked social media platforms in the same way it had done on polling day months before.

This urge to control the Internet comes as social media use in Africa continues to grow. In September last year, Facebook announced that its active user population in Africa had grown to 120 million in June from 100 million in September the previous year. About 80% of these users access this social media site on their mobile cellular phones. “Some people use the Internet in bad ways. It’s everywhere. But the Chinese have put in place security measures and we will look at these so that we stop these abuses on the Internet.” – Robert Mugabe

Making inept governments nervous

Across Africa, there seems to be a growing relationship between political change and social media usage. In Zimbabwe, for example, the government is exploring ways to create its own social media networks that are monitored by the state. Zimbabwe’s Sunday Mail reported that the government is encouraging local coders to come up with social networks over which the government can have greater control.

“There’s a lot of abuse that happens there,” President Robert Mugabe told The Southern Daily. “Some people use the Internet in bad ways. It’s everywhere. But the Chinese have put in place security measures and we will look at these so that we stop these abuses on the Internet.” Mugabe has reason to worry, for #ThisFlag, a citizen campaign started by Pastor Evan Mawarire to complain about unemployment, general decay and corruption, has become a social media phenomenon.

Reports have also emerged from Congo-Brazzaville, indicating that the government ordered Airtel and MTN to disable Internet use. The action was directed at mobile networks, given that very few Congolese use fixed lines to access the web. Similar anecdotes of Internet outage were reported in Burundi at the peak of the protests against President Pierre Nkurunziza’s bid for a third term.

‘This flag’ campaign initiated by a Zimbabwean pastor became a social media phenomenon with fellow Zimbabweans posting the flag as a sign of unity against the government of Zimbabwe. (Photo: Terry Feuerborn/Flickr)

The genesis of social media blackouts

Following the social-media-fuelled revolutions in North Africa, which saw the ousting of long-serving presidents in Tunisia and Egypt flowing over to Libya and the Middle East, African governments have become mindful of the platform’s growing political influence.

The main drivers of the unrest were poverty, rising prices, social exclusion and anger over corruption and personal enrichment among the political elite, but when all these factors are linked to a demographic bulge of young people unable to find work and with Internet access, social media’s potential for political mobilization and information circulation becomes potent.  

“Looking at the current political tide, government in the next five years will have a hard time and switching off social media won’t be the answer.”

As a result, President Ben Ali (former president of Tunisia) and Hosni Mubarak (former president of Egypt) separately responded with censoring the media, including banning social media, although this didn’t salvage their regimes. Other countries have moved to arrest or threaten bloggers or those they accuse of spreading ‘malicious rumours.’ Uganda, for example, is still on the hunt for one Tom Voltaire Okwalinga, or TVO, as he is popularly known, a mysterious anti-Museveni social media activist who uses a pseudo username to post information about what transpires behind closed political curtains.

The Ugandan government first asked Facebook to take down TVO’s account but the social media giant turned down the request. Since then, the government has resorted to arresting individuals who are critical of it, accusing them of being the yet-to-be-identified TVO.

Social media and political activism

It has been argued that social media was initially meant to connect people; to make the world a global village, as was said in the 1960s by communications theorist Marshall McLuhan. Its popularity, however, has mostly been ascribed to its ability to spread information across frontiers robustly. Mcluhan died in 1980, long before the advent of social media.

Despite this development, analysts such as Malcolm Gladwell of the New Yorker, and Andrew Mwenda of The Independent Magazine in Uganda hold that social media play a rather secondary role and that all the revolutions credited to social media could have succeeded without the various platforms.

In his article Does Egypt Need Twitter, Gladwell, for example, scoffs: “People protested and brought down governments before Facebook was invented. They did it before the Internet came along.”

Nicholas Opiyo, a lawyer and human rights activist, argues the contrary. He believes that social networks have multiplied the possibilities for the retrieval and dissemination of political information exponentially and thus afforded the Internet user a variety of supplemental and relatively low-cost access points to political information and engagement. “Social-media users can be automatically updated about their friends’ political activities through their news feed. They can comment on these activities or can join online discussion groups, which actively engages them in political conversation from the convenience of their homes and at any time of the day,” says Opiyo.

Anonymity is sometimes required on social media especially in political times (Photo:Development UEA/ Flickr)

Can cracking down on social media reverse the political tide?

From the above examples of social media-sponsored political change, governments in Africa have reason for their uneasiness towards social media to inform their regulation.

Although Uganda does not yet have a social media regulatory law, a Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung country report indicates that the Ugandan government is working on new restrictions to formulate a substantive law to regulate the use of social media. The report further adds that the Ugandan police force has already set up a specialised social media monitoring unit.

Rosebell Kagumire, a Ugandan journalist and blogger, told the African Centre for Media Excellence (ACME) that even if government cracks down on social media, it would not reverse the political direction Uganda is currently taking. “With freedom of assembly limited, social media has become like rallies where people express themselves without fear. So government needs to come up with excuses, like ‘national security’, which doesn’t need any explanation and accountability, to block Ugandans from expressing opinions that it doesn’t want to hear,” she argues. “But looking at the current political tide, government in the next five years will have a hard time and switching off social media won’t be the answer,” added Kagumire.

Social media could have partly influenced the growing political dissent in Africa but its role is minor when compared to the actual reasons that are pushing Africans to social media activism. After all, if African governments addressed unemployment, corruption, democracy and justice, among other factors, they would have no problems with how their citizenry used social media platforms.