African Elections and Social Media Shutdowns
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:18
Thank you so much. Hi and welcome from my side. Welcome to social media shutdowns and elections in Africa.
00:28
I would like to start by telling you that we all know that Africa is not a country, it's a continent. So I'm sorry for this title but we have three different panelists from three different African countries.
00:41
So we do our best to show what's happening on the African continent during elections when it comes to media shutdowns. My name is Christian Echle, I'm the director of Cast Media Africa, which is the media program of the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung for Sub-Saharan Africa.
01:01
It is the foundation's mandate to support democracies around the world and as part of that we are obviously also supporting the media, which are a very important player when it comes to being the watchdogs of democracies, especially on the African continent. Before I introduce the panelists, I would like to start by giving you a
01:23
little bit of background on the project which is connected to this panel here. It's basically a cooperation between the Konrad Adenauer Foundation and Republika. And the project I would like to tell you a little bit about is Africa Blogging. It is a network of 18 African bloggers for now, political bloggers which are giving, maybe we
01:47
can call it an alternative view on what's happening in politics and society in several African countries. As some of you may know, the media landscape in quite a few African countries is not as good as we would like it to be.
02:04
It's either influenced by governments, it's heavily corrupted sometimes through the brown envelope phenomenon, and some of the media houses are just not financially sustainable, journalists are not as well trained as we would like them to be. So what we see as Cast Media Africa is that social media activists, bloggers,
02:25
people on Twitter, Facebook users have become a very relevant voice in those countries in order to give alternative views, as I said before, to help people build their own opinion, to get access to information. And we decided to create this network in order to make those bloggers more visible and to support them with training workshops and so on.
02:49
For now, it's mainly active in southern Africa and eastern Africa, but we will add a few western African bloggers in the course of the year. So I would like to invite all of you to visit the website africablogging.org to learn
03:03
a little bit more about our bloggers and about their stories that they share on that platform. Blogging has been, maybe you can call it, a grey area for many years now in sub-Saharan Africa, where many governments didn't take bloggers too seriously first as a public voice, but by now the situation has changed quite a bit
03:26
and governments are rather trying to control the social media sphere. We will get into that during our discussion, but the most visible point maybe, where you can really see that those governments try to control the social media space,
03:43
is around elections right now, where social media services are just shut down maybe for 72 hours around an election. The government says this is being done in order to keep quiet, to keep peace, to avoid any appeals,
04:01
but of course it's also, and mainly, it's a big cut for media freedom and for the exchange of opinion. So I'm very, very happy that we have three Africa blogging bloggers with us today to discuss this phenomenon and also to broaden the discussion a little bit around blogging and the legal situation in several African countries.
04:29
I would like to have a Q&A maybe around 20 minutes before we end up, so if you have any questions, I would like to ask you to save them up for those last 20 minutes and then I will hand over the mic to the audience
04:43
and I hope we will have a good discussion about the input that we get from the bloggers. So, I would like to invite you to the stage. We start with Ruth Einer-Tingiebe from Uganda. Ruth, please join us. Ruth is a journalist, blogger and social media trainer
05:10
and apart from her own blog, she is writing for Youth Hub Africa, future challenges and also for several projects of the Deutsche Welle. Her topics are tech, society, politics, health, gender and youth. Ruth, it's great to have you here.
05:27
Thank you for having me. The second blogger I would like to announce is Daniel Okot-Ominde from Kenya.
05:42
Daniel actually runs several blogs. He also has a lifestyle blog, but nonetheless, we like him and we thought he's a good political blogger as well. He's a blogger and a radio journalist. He's not based in Nairobi, which might surprise you, because Nairobi has become to be the hub for ICT and blogging developments in Eastern Africa,
06:06
but he grew up and lives in Kisumu, which is a city with half a million citizens next to Lake Victoria in western Kenya. And the third panelist in our round is Takura Shangeja from Zimbabwe. Takura, please join us.
06:30
He is a journalist and blogger. I think this is also something we can discuss. What is a journalist? What is a blogger? Where's the line? So he's a journalist and blogger from Zimbabwe, publishing for Al Jazeera and the South African weekly Mail and Guardian,
06:45
so very much quality publication he's contributing to. Welcome to the panel. Thank you. Okay. Let's switch back a little more than two months.
07:01
February 18, elections in Uganda, national elections. The president of Uganda, Yoveri Museveni, is in power since 1986. So when the first republic took place, he was already 20 years in power. So quite a long time, I'd say.
07:21
And Ruth woke up, being ready to vote, to fulfill your democratic duty, but at the same time you wanted to start your social media channels. And then what happened, Ruth? Please fill us in. So 18th February, 2016, we went to the polls as a country, Uganda.
07:41
What happened was we had anticipated, obviously, that there would be a lot of social media action because way back in 2011, when we had the other elections, there wasn't that much activity online. I remember it was just a handful of young people that were on Twitter
08:02
and we decided to use two hashtags, Uganda decides and Uganda votes, just so that we would let the world know what was going on. But more importantly, know what was going on where we were, because what usually happens is people leave the city centre to go and vote back home in their villages. So it's one of those long trips that you take, just so you can go and connect to the people back at home.
08:27
So what happened was we had, leading to the elections, we had seen a lot of internet activity. I remember the highest being the second presidential debate. We had two presidential debates live on TV and the second one, which had about 198,000 tweets at a certain time.
08:50
And that had never happened in Uganda, obviously. And we also had so many conversations on will social media deliver an election for Uganda,
09:00
like it did with Nigeria, as we had seen the months before. And so there was really a high anticipation. So 18th February, I remember being at home and hoping that I would wake up and go online and be able to see what people are saying and where they're voting from and what is going on.
09:22
But it wasn't working. And it's one of those things because in 2011, we had no voice and we had no text service because networks would just slow them down, you know. It happens and it happens over Christmas as well because so many people travel
09:41
and there's so much activity online, so usually you have just a slowdown of systems. But what I didn't think was it was social media that had been put to a halt. I just thought that it would be voice and because phone calls never go through, text messages don't go, but that was working.
10:04
So that is why when I turned on my Twitter and I couldn't see anything, I thought, okay, it's going to come back until I got a phone call at about 10 o'clock, I think. A friend of mine, because we had been working on a team towards elections, gave me a call and said, are you able to get online?
10:24
I'm like, no, I'm not able to get online. I was like, are you sure? He's like, yes. He's like, yes. Now, you see, the online systems have been switched off. Social media is off. I said, what? He's like, yes, I'm going to send you a cord. He actually said a cord.
10:40
I'm going to send you a cord that you can use. And he didn't know what he was talking about. So he said, it's a cord and you need to go to Google Play and download this. So that is when, because I think we're using a VPN called VPYR something, and it almost looks like a cord. So now I remember why he said that.
11:02
And yes, so I just downloaded the application and within a minute, I think it was Argentina that I was tweeting from. And I got online and that's when I realized that it was just not me. It was everyone that had access to a smartphone who was unable to communicate.
11:24
That means that we were looking at about 1.5, 1.6, 1.7 million Ugandans that were not able to use their smartphones because that's how many people we have. Well, everyone was not able to use their smartphones, but 1.5 million people is who we have actively using Facebook at the moment.
11:48
Twitter is about 400,000 active accounts in the country. So it was quite interesting to see people being able to access the internet using other means.
12:03
It turned us all into techie people because we're all talking VPNs, we're all talking bypassing IP addresses, we're all talking sophisticated things. I mean, I have had some training because I'm a blogger and because we know that governments in sub-Saharan Africa are never that friendly
12:23
when it comes to online. Or rather, we can begin to see that there's a lot of censorship, but what we don't expect is for it to actually happen. You always anticipate, but when it happens, it still comes as a shock. So yes, I could say that is what happened.
12:40
The blockhead happened lasted 72 hours, but I know there are so many people who have never removed the VPNs from their phones and we laugh about it all the time because we never know when you're going to be off. Then in about on March, around between March 10th and I think March 13th,
13:04
2016, the government then came up with a law that was tabled in parliament that is about the censorship of social media, but also giving powers to the Uganda Communications Commission, which is in charge of the networks to be able to switch off social media networks
13:23
whenever they want. The law was tabled in parliament, but it has not been passed, but we also know that we have a transition. Right now, the 9th parliament is winding up the activities, and actually in this month, we'll see the transition from 9th parliament to 10th parliament.
13:46
So we don't know if that will be one of the first priorities of the 10th parliament, to be able to pass the law that gives power to the government and government institutions in charge of communications to be able to switch on the networks when they want at any given time.
14:08
We will discuss the legal implications, although also the official explanation of the government for that in a moment, but let's go on to Kenya first. Kenya, I think it came to a shock to many Kenyans and also to the global community
14:24
when after the elections in December 2007, there was severe post-election violence. Up to 1,500 people died, up to half a million people were displaced internally, and that's why when it came to the elections in March 2013,
14:44
the whole Kenyan society was really in the state of mind that we have to keep peaceful now, that we should avoid any conflict. But this came with a few unpleasant side effects also when it comes to the use of social media and SMS services. So Daniel, please could you tell us a little bit about that?
15:02
You see, in 2007 and a month after we had elections, Kenya broke into violence and about 1,300 people lost their lives in the violence. It was something that was unprecedented before, although we've had violence in Kenya around elections before,
15:22
but this happened on a very big scale. We imagine that in 2007, the Internet was not everywhere, Facebook was just starting up. Personally, I think I signed up to Facebook in late 2007 or 2008, I'm not sure exactly when I signed up, and I was living in a major tunnel.
15:43
By then, I was living in Nairobi. And if you can look at the vast majority of 42 million Kenyans, most of whom live in rural areas, social media was an art of them. So with the years that come by and the Internet penetration in Kenya kept increasing, and social media started becoming vibrant,
16:03
and I think Kenya is one of the countries with the most vibrant social media in the whole of Africa. So people started worrying that if people are able to talk about politics, hear ideas, and engage in social media,
16:22
this could then be used to plan violence around elections. So people really started worrying. But the thing is, the events of 2007 were still fresh in our minds. So when we approached elections in 2013, we saw a situation where one person would say something on social media,
16:41
and you'll see people coming in and trying to drive them away from that thought because the effects of the 2007 post-election violence were still fresh in our minds. And we were sort of behaving in a cagey way, where we did not really want anything that would take us back to that period.
17:02
Coming forward to the period post-2013 elections, right now I don't know if we are forgetting what happened back then, or is it that people are just starting to exercise their freedom of expression more. So then again, right now as we are approaching another election that's coming next year,
17:22
we are seeing a lot of vibrancy in social media. People are openly discussing issues, and you see most of the issues in Kenya's political sphere is never really about what issue candidate A or candidate B stands for, or what issues party A or party B stands for. Kenyan politics is played around alongside ethnic tribes.
17:41
Where does my tribe stand in terms of the next election? Which party are we supporting, or which coalition of parties do people from my ethnic community stand with? And that in itself creates tensions all throughout the country,
18:02
and especially in social media, even when it's not about what particular issues somebody stands with. For example, somebody may say something, and people just start reacting because he's from a given tribe. And those conversations usually degenerate into very ugly tribal discourse
18:23
that most government agencies fear that this could lead into violence. And that's probably why right now we are probably worried about going the route Uganda went when it comes to 2007. Not really because this could create violence,
18:42
but the fact that it has the potential of creating violence actually gives the government a reason to want to shut it down in pretext. Probably they just don't want people discussing politics or issues around politics, especially when it comes to that electioneering period,
19:00
and they'll use that as an excuse. And even when this happened in Uganda that morning, it was all over the Kenyan digital space, on Facebook and on Instagram and on WhatsApp, people were discussing all these issues. But primarily because we were discussing it from a different angle. We were telling ourselves, and the conversation was, our president, Uru Kinata, was a good friend of President Museveni.
19:24
Of course, that is until they disagreed over the oil pipeline route. But the conversation was their friend. He could borrow ideas from Museveni, and when we go into our elections next year, switch off social media. So even right now as we speak, Kenyans have downloaded
19:41
those virtual private network applications, both for their mobile devices and for their computers, and others are still learning how to use them. But we are really, really hoping that we will never really have to use them. Thank you very much. And that brings us to the third country, Zimbabwe,
20:04
which is run by another long-term president, Robert Mugabe, his president since 1987 and served as prime minister of Zimbabwe eight years before that. And he turned the country into one of the most restrictive countries in sub-Saharan Africa when it comes to the freedom of expression.
20:21
So I think, Takura and Zimbabwe, we can talk about a more permanent way of controlling the social media. What are your experiences as a blogger there? Well, in Zimbabwe's case, which in part would apply to a number of other African countries, is that access to the Internet is not a right.
20:42
It is not something that is given or expected that every citizen should enjoy it. It's not like water. And in the process, government then treats access to social media more as a privilege or that thing that can be enjoyed by those that have access to money
21:02
or that can afford it or those that sort of like have a direct interest in it. It's not assumed to be available for everyone. But in terms of actually regulating social media and the Internet, the government in Zimbabwe's case is more worried about content on social media.
21:21
So they don't assist you to get onto Facebook. They don't assist you to get access to a computer as such. But they will definitely want to see what you put up on social media, what you put up on your website, on your blog site. And this is because largely you can be criminally prosecuted. I mean you can be prosecuted for writing on the basis of a criminal charge.
21:46
And I think this is a trend across most of southern Africa and Africa itself, where governments essentially only start panicking when it comes to the content of social media. And that's why in between elections they might not shut it down or they might not arrest as many people.
22:03
But it's primarily because they are worried about the effect of the content on the public consciousness, as well as if the consciousness will lead to political action that is not in their favor. But there's a second point in the case of Zimbabwe, and I think again with the majority of African countries,
22:21
which is collusion or some sort of unwritten understanding between governments and telecommunications companies. African governments, I think in the case of Uganda and other countries, it's not necessarily that the government goes and switches off the connection. The government instructs the specific telecommunications companies to switch off the connection.
22:46
And the specific telecommunications companies, because they function primarily for profit, and I think in my view others may differ, I think they don't even regard access to the Internet as a key and fundamental human right.
23:00
They simply switch it off because you don't want to lose your license, you don't want to lose your profit margins and so on. So the big challenge there is that governments, yes, will have a specific negative attitude towards social media, people that write and use it, but telecommunications companies also don't want political content or to be implicated in the politics of a country or where government says to them,
23:24
if you don't do as we say, we'll simply shut you off or at least raid your offices and close your companies. The third aspect is that, in Zimbabwe's case, and it's an important aspect concerning why governments have the arrogance to switch off social media connections during elections.
23:42
There is a challenge of the very public itself, the citizens of Africa in part, not viewing access to the Internet as a key component of their development or as a key right. They tend to also view it as a privilege or a tool of those that are privileged,
24:02
and the way it comes to them is largely by way of choice. It's not necessarily that if you're going to have mobile cash, if you're going to have groups that discuss development issues at community level, that it's a given. It's more or less your efforts and whatever private company wants you to be online. And this is a key challenge in terms of how, when the Internet is shut down,
24:25
you won't find people still having an ability to communicate around how to challenge that shutdown, even in the short term, whether it's during an election or during a generally peaceful period. So I think, just to conclude this first part, I think Internet shutdowns have to be considered from a three-pronged perspective.
24:48
First, the fact that governments want to manage content for political reasons to prevent dissent and that they have laws that do that which is linked to the criminalization of freedom of expression. Second, that telecommunications companies do have a vested interest in following what the government says,
25:06
so they will try as much as is possible not to challenge the government, whilst at the same time denying ordinary people access to the Internet and therefore access to freedom of expression and access to information. Thirdly, there's limited public demand because there's limited knowledge
25:22
about the importance of the Internet and the future of the Internet, which was being discussed in part this morning in the keynote address. To what extent is the Internet still a democratic right in the strict sense of the word which protects the right to privacy as well as accentuates freedom of expression and access to information.
25:41
And this lack of public debate within the African context sometimes gives governments, in collusion with private companies, the go-ahead to continue shutting down as and when they deem it necessary. Thank you very much to all three of you for giving us this first overview of the situation in your countries. Let's discuss the influence of the web community on political processes.
26:08
So, Ruth, how did the Internet community react in Uganda? Was there a public outcry? Would you say that it has changed the atmosphere, also the access to information during the elections
26:21
that Facebook and Twitter have been shut down? Or is it more something that we discuss between people that are interested in the Internet and see the importance? So, there was a lot of outrage online in the morning of the 18th of February.
26:42
And the outrage was, how dare they? I think that, I mean, we see so many things that happen, but we never... It is one of those things we least expected. You didn't expect that you'd wake up and find that there's no Facebook and there's no Twitter, there's no WhatsApp. So, people were very, very outraged. Has that changed anything at the moment?
27:05
I think what usually happens, and I think tapping into what he's saying, is the conversation was how dare they, how dare they, how dare they. After that, it was, we're back to normal, the government did this, and moving on.
27:22
And so there hasn't been a lot of conversation on, so what do we do as citizens? As people who are empowered by the Internet, how do we take this fight beyond the conversation that we are having at the moment online? Or the fact that we didn't have access to the Internet, we use VPNs, now we're back, and that's it.
27:45
So, you don't have the conversation of what next, the future of how do we begin empowering others, how do we begin fostering a community that understands that this cannot happen again. And I think that conversation is not happening, because people are saying, those of us who really earn from using the Internet,
28:08
whose livelihood depends on the Internet, but then we're also thinking, so what else can I do? What else can I do? How else can I earn a living? So, we were definitely outraged, we were definitely with so much hate at that point, so much anger,
28:29
but the conversation shifted to something comfortable, because that was a very uncomfortable place to be. And so people have actually moved on, yes, there are those who are very paranoid and still have the VPNs on their phones,
28:45
are still using Tor to access web on their laptops and things like that, but then everyone else seems to have moved on. I mean, my father doesn't care. Actually, I never gave him the VPN thing, I never told him what it was,
29:00
and he wasn't outraged about it, he was like, oh, they did that, okay, yeah, three days later, he's back online, he's like, oh, there's so many messages, so how come you people could access this? And you see, that's a vast majority of the people that would now be able to carry the conversation forward as well,
29:20
because while you look at the elite or maybe the people that are online that have access to VPNs, I think there's a comfort of I'm still able to go to work, I'm still able to earn my pay, I'm still able to afford healthcare, but we then don't think about the implication of what it has on the grassroots person, and I think that is where the problem is.
29:46
Daniel, the bloggers in Kenya are among the best organized bloggers in Eastern Africa. There's a huge organization, Bloggers Association of Kenya, BAIC, and you all went through that experience of the 2007 post-election violence.
30:04
So, what are the discussion lines when it comes to the regulation of social media, especially the regulation of hate speech in Kenya? What's the position? Is there a common position for the bloggers? Well, I think that is a conversation that we started having in Kenya, but it's
30:22
still a conversation that we really do not know where we want to head with it, because when you talk about regulation of social media, we really want an environment where every social media user, people who are using it on the microblogging sites such as Facebook and Twitter,
30:40
or people who are running their own blogs or domains or on WordPress or Blogger, they're able to put out content that's really not just sensitive, but content that's not inciting other people to hate or to violate, but just being able to freely put up their ideas out there.
31:01
The association, I don't think they really have a position about it at the moment, because there's this discussion that's ongoing about, one, should we regulate in the first place? If we regulate, then what are the parameters we are going to regulate?
31:21
What are we regulating against? We talk about hate speech. Hate speech in itself has been defined in the Kenyan laws very vaguely, and I think that's something that's happening with other laws across Africa. I, for instance, remember there's a law that has just recently been declared illegal in Kenya,
31:43
and this is a law that so many people have been tried with, presented with in court. I think since March 2015, we just realized there was a law that was existing in the Kenyan laws, and it was sneaked in at some point, and people didn't really realize this law was sneaked in.
32:02
After we ratified a new constitution in 2010, and that's a constitution that has been praised all over the world as being a very progressive constitution, this constitution enshrines the freedom of expression under the basic rights.
32:23
We call it the Bill of Rights, and it's one of the articles in the Bill of Rights. It's on Article 33 of the Kenyan constitution. Now, any article in the Kenyan constitution that's under the Bill of Rights is an article where those articles, if you want to limit the freedoms enshrined in those articles, you cannot make a law against it in parliament.
32:42
You have to first go to the people themselves and have a referendum, and the people have to vote to allow you to make those changes. Nobody can vote on their behalf, not even their elected representatives. So what happens is that when they were making laws that go hand in hand with that provision of the constitution,
33:04
they brought in this law that says that, you know, it's called misuse of license telecommunication, equipment. So that law basically allowed you to be arrested for sending messages either using your computer, your phone, or social media platforms,
33:25
and these are messages, and they say messages that annoy other people, messages that threaten other people, and it's the annoyance that really becomes vague, because if I am a thief, I'm a public servant, I am a thief, I've stolen public money, and then you realize that I have stolen public money and you go and write about it on social media or on blog,
33:46
definitely you will annoy me. And people have been taken to court and charged under this offense, and in 2015, we had seven people who were charged under that offense, and it became really, really a big issue.
34:01
In January 2016 alone, 17 people in one month were charged using that law. So it got the bloggers' decision of Kenya saying, wait, I mean, this cannot really go on, and what it really did is it limited the freedoms people have,
34:20
because when you charge under that law, first you are arrested by the police, and in most cases, after you are arrested, you know, you're taken around, nobody knows where you are. There's an instance that happened last year. Somebody was arrested in Mombasa, flown to Nairobi. His family did not know he was flown to Nairobi because he was just picked from their house. He was flown from Nairobi, taken to the director of criminal investigations offices,
34:44
and, you know, it took a while for people to realize where he really was, and during that time, some of his basic fundamental rights to justice were denied, and by the time he was being produced in court to answer to these charges, it had already taken three days, and I know that's even illegal in the Kenyan constitution,
35:03
but even beyond being arrested, you're arrested, and then before the case is even determined, you have to either be out on bail or you'll be in police. Most people who've been, of the 17 people, or let's say 24 people who've been arrested,
35:21
there was probably some organizations that came out and paid their bail for them. The bail is always, you know, 50,000 shillings. That's about, is it $500, US dollars? But, you know, as a blogger or as somebody who uses social media, if I want to really talk about something that's causing, you know, harm in the public,
35:42
and here I am, before I tweet, I have to ask myself questions. Am I ready to go and be detained for three days in a police cell, or do I have $500 to pay as bail? So it makes me sit back and think, and that way it interferes with the people's freedom of expression.
36:00
Some people will say, you know, it's not worth it. But I think, so that's really the situation, and it really makes us afraid, even as bloggers in Kenya. So we really want some form of regulation. We want some form of legal framework to be able to work with, but we do not want a framework that again infringes on our basic rights to, you know,
36:24
to be able to receive and impart information freely. Takura, you made a very important point, I think, about the role of the telecommunication providers, which are really one of the driving forces in sub-Saharan Africa for the upcoming digitalization. They decide about the cost for data, they decide about their networks, how to extend them,
36:45
and they are obviously very cooperative when governments approach them. So is there any way from your point of view that the society in Zimbabwe, for example, could put some pressure on those telecommunication providers in order to provide the services you are paying for rather than shutting down the services during an election?
37:07
Yes, I think there are many ways, but I think the key way would be to make everybody understand access to the Internet or access to telephony as a human right,
37:22
particularly in our part of the world where these things are assumed to be more privileges coming from the north among other places, and people tend to draw back and not consider it as part of an everyday necessity because it's largely the smartphone which is upper middle class
37:43
and the politically connected elites will be using these things. So the only way to draw back the telecommunications companies as well as draw back the governments, because governments know for a fact that people don't really see the necessity or the emerging importance of the Internet, particularly when you look at the global south.
38:06
Governments know that this lack of complete understanding of the true impact of the Internet helps them retain control and helps them also control the telecommunications companies. So there's definitely a need in Zimbabwe's case to explain further
38:20
what the right to freedom of expression and access to information means vis-à-vis the Internet and access to the Internet, what it means vis-à-vis social media. And this is a genetic problem across the African continent. I can promise you that probably the Zimbabwean government, because we have elections in two years, and other governments within the region
38:43
are looking at ways and lessons to draw from Uganda, Burundi, among others, because it happened, you switch off the Internet for a day, and nothing happens afterwards. Central Africa did it. The Central African Republic, they've done it as well. No, not Central Africa, it's Congo-Brazzaville.
39:02
Congo-Brazzaville did it. And so you've got about four or five countries that have done it, setting a good example to other governments that have a problem with elections to also do it, and learn lessons as to how not to get the people angry after switching off the Internet, because after you see the electoral period has gone, if it's 72 hours,
39:21
and you've announced the results, and then you switch on the Internet, everybody's probably busy scrolling to see what messages were posted two days ago. So they're too busy looking at the past instead of looking at the future. So I think the primary task or urgent action that is required is in two parts. The public awareness of the democratic importance of the right to access the Internet
39:45
as linked with other rights, which includes that of privacy. And then secondly, a clear comparative explanation of how the Internet is used in the Global North vis-à-vis the Global South, because sometimes where it is a right here,
40:05
telecommunications companies in the Global South present it as a commodity. And when they present it as a commodity, it basically means that access to the Internet becomes the privilege of the few and a greater majority will actually require it more
40:23
in order to enjoy their broader human rights. Thank you. I would like to open up the discussion towards the audience. Are there any questions yet within the audience? Could you just show me a hand? Yes. So where's the question?
40:41
Could you just introduce yourself quickly and also tell us whom you addressed the question to? I guess the complete audience. My name is Dirk Hirsch and I'm just a programmer. Well, it seems to be very ineffective to shut down the Internet a short time before the election.
41:02
How long is the shutdown? And another question is, I guess the Internet is growing in Africa very much. Are the governments afraid of the Internet and are there any, well, do they regulate or over-regulate the Internet?
41:27
For example, with blocking social media regularly or just have only a white list of Internet sites
41:41
and all other sites are disallowed, like in some Arabian countries. Thank you very much. Are there other questions? Yes, next to the aisle and in the back. Maybe we take those two and then we bring it back to the panel. Hi. My name is Mark. I'm a journalist of sorts.
42:04
And I'm curious to what happens to digital activists during this particular time. Are they arrested? Are they somehow mistreated? And what happens to them after the social media is turned back on?
42:21
Thank you. And last question in the back, please. Hi. My name is Alex. I'm a government service designer. My question is whether the shutdowns of the Internet make it into the political discourse from political parties or whether it's part and parcel of the act of government.
42:43
Is it something that is ever addressed by opposition parties? Okay. So why only three days? Why not two weeks around the elections? What is done in regards to regulation? How are the digital activists treated? And how are the other parties reacting to this?
43:03
Ruth, may I ask you to start? Okay. So for you, I'll talk on Uganda's case. So it was shut down for 72 hours and it was mainly Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp that were not accessible. The rest of the sites were accessible.
43:21
That is why we were able to go to Google Play or go to your iPhone and be able to download any VPN. When it comes to digital activists, in my country, there has been no arrest of a digital activist.
43:45
They are there. We know who they are. We have so many people that are fighting for freedom online. But we don't have any arrests that were done during that period as well. The political parties stayed using – actually, it was an irony because the ruling party had people tweeting on their behalf that were using VPNs.
44:09
So it was very ironical that it happened that way. I remember we actually made fun about it and said, so what's the point? Did you not get the memo? You should have stayed offline.
44:23
But then you also don't know the hierarchy of who said what and when in regards to shutting down the internet. Who agreed and who do they report to, who are they accountable to and things like that. So I think that is what I can answer.
44:41
Thank you. Daniel? Are governments afraid of the internet in Africa? Yes, they are very afraid of the internet. I think that's why they shut this thing down. When the internet came into Africa, I think some countries just took it and ran away with it, like Kenya. We embraced social media, we embraced technology and we wanted to do things very fast.
45:06
And the government actually encouraged us and they made internet fairly affordable to people. Currently, according to the latest statistics from the Communication Authority of Kenya, internet penetration in Kenya is at 72%. Amazing. But what they did not figure out is what kind of a monster this could cost to them
45:26
in terms of people being able to freely express their ideas. I want to give an example from a commercial end. Then you can just think about if that was political. Recently, there was a bank that got closed in Kenya.
45:41
The word on the street is that Kenyans on Twitter chased away a bank. Coincidentally, the bank was called Chess Bank. What happened is there were some irregularities happening at that bank. These irregularities sort of got leaked on social media. And Kenyans were able to rush into that particular bank and withdraw.
46:02
Everybody wanted their money, their deposits. So you can imagine what the situation is if everybody goes to the bank on one day to withdraw their money. That bank was closed the following day by the Central Bank of Kenya and put under receivership because they were not able to meet their financial obligations. So let's put this in a scenario where that's the government.
46:22
Something is wrong with the government and it's come out in the public and it's been trending at number one for three, four days and people are agitated and they're moving on to now. It's past just seeing and talking about it. They're moving into action. So no government would really want a situation like that.
46:42
Digital activists in Kenya, are they arrested? Well, in Kenya we've had instances where people were arrested just before or after elections. But if you're a digital activist in Kenya, I think every single day you can be arrested. Like I just mentioned before, we've had 24 people in about two years who've been arrested and charged with this clause
47:08
which the court just declared illegal the other day. So it's really a fact that's alive in Kenya. Being a digital activist is risky and it's not just risky because you will be arrested. The government, just like they're doing in Uganda, they also have their own digital activists.
47:25
In fact, in Kenya there's a whole department at State House that's called the digital department where the government has hired their own bloggers to do stuff for them. Their chief was a former blogger and he has people who are employed to counter.
47:43
For example, if there's an anti-government trending topic on Twitter, within one or one and a half hours you will see a pro-government hashtag trending on Twitter. At times those attacks are not just limited to social media. At times these attacks are actually real attacks.
48:03
We've had bloggers disappear in Kenya. There's a blogger who disappeared and we don't know where he is. It's speculation about the last place he was seen and most people say he was seen in a government building and he was never to be seen again. Just a quick point about regulation.
48:24
Social media or the internet is largely regulated technically, licensing of a specific company. Essentially a telecommunications company gets licensed by a government. But then there's another dimension which relates mainly to content. The content is always about national security.
48:43
In our case, in Zimbabwe, it's also about undermining the authority of national services, the president, if you propose something like that. You've got a dual regulation or regulatory framework. It's two ways. The company is being regulated, paying its taxes, being threatened with withdrawal of licenses.
49:04
And then you've got the citizen or the user who is also being regulated in relation to content and what you say on these platforms. And one of the major reasons why some governments still retain this multiple regulatory framework is because it gives them control either way. You can control the company and you can control the end user of the internet commodity.
49:29
Thank you very much. Yes, more questions, please.
49:43
Thank you very much, Barbara Gruban. Deutsche Welle Academy, raising awareness is a recurring theme which is very important to counter restrictive behavior. Maybe in the case of Uganda, could you tell us what role traditional media, namely radios, played in raising awareness and creating debate around the closing down of the internet?
50:14
Hello, Catherine Corrick. I was just wondering if any of the countries are learning lessons from China, Iran,
50:22
and other more restricted countries where they don't necessarily close the internet, they just constantly monitor it. I'm Katrina Hilt from GIZ and I would be interested to know how you're connected
50:43
with other civil society organizations who are maybe not mainly active in the digital sphere.
51:00
Bruce from Zambia. Mine is not necessarily a question but a quick contribution. We are neighbors with Zimbabwe and also some things that Kenya is going through in terms of tribalism in the voting process are important. I wanted to add to the question he had raised about why closing down the internet for a few days.
51:21
I think the fundamental challenge African governments have is the management of the election results process. And what we had in our election last year in Zambia was the situation where the public broadcaster was given exclusive access to the database where the elections were being deposited, results were coming through.
51:41
And there were differences in the results being published by the broadcasting station and the results that were coming out officially from the national totaling center. And so there's concerns that if people have got access to social media and they're able to do their own parallel voter tabulation,
52:01
for instance what we've been doing recently has been using smartphones to get pictures of the tallied ballot results at a totaling center at a constituency level, then you deposit them into a group. Then people are able to tell you on their own from district wards, constituency up to provincial level.
52:20
And they don't want to have that kind of collaborative evidence because then it has an impact on the flow of their own sort of management of results. And now we're going to an election in August and we're very much interested in what's happened in Uganda and also the experiences of Zimbabwe and Kenya because they have a direct bearing on the kind of attitude that we are going to have.
52:41
Already we have seen that one, there's a specific piece of law that has been put in place to stop what they are calling unverified publication of results, meaning that any person who goes on social media and says, here where I am, the results are as follows, without waiting for the retaining officer to announce them on national television is liable for an offense.
53:03
So it's things like that that worry the regime. They would rather keep it low until they are sure that they've done what they want to do. And then probably it's important that those critical two or three days before the results are announced, there's a shutdown of social media. Thank you very much, Bruce, for your contribution from Zambia.
53:20
And I think we will make sure to monitor the selection very closely and to see what will actually happen. But I suggest that we now close the panel with those three questions that were raised from the audience. The role of the civil society or the connection to the civil society, the role of the traditional media, and the look towards China and Asia where we have much more restrictive laws in place already.
53:47
So in about raising awareness, it was a news item, as far as I can remember, with the TV stations. With the radio stations, we have over a hundred radio stations in the country.
54:00
And I wouldn't be able to know if they were giving out any information in this. But those that I listened to in Kampala, it was a conversation, yes, on the daily shows. But then again, there was a lot more on – you remember we had parliamentary and presidential elections happening at the same time. So there was a lot of conversation about who won where in those particular communities.
54:25
Very little said about this is what is going on in regards to internet and it is being tampered with and things like that. The main leading TV stations, like I said, had it as an item.
54:41
But most of them were covering the reading of the results because that was going on continuously as they were coming through. I think that was actually more of what was being covered. In regards to connections with civil society, yes, there is a lot of civil society conversation, but I think what we have not had is that togetherness in being able to talk about internet freedom.
55:07
But also for Uganda's case, it is a growing, very young internet community that we have in regards to legislation and people talking about policy, actually especially about the policy.
55:21
Very few people – I think there are a number of organizations, but there are not that many. And the conversation is not paid attention to that much. You have very many enthusiasts, yes, but very few people to deliver on the debate. Learning lessons, I think we have known this for – I have known this for a while at least.
55:44
Especially in sub-Saharan Africa, you have a lot of governments that are monitoring the internet. There is a lot of surveillance going on, and especially in Uganda where we had a recent scandal, I think WikiLeaks. There were some WikiLeaks emails that were leaked about purchase of equipment for surveillance.
56:08
It was nicknamed Fungua Macho, which is a Swahili word. We know that those exist, and there are neighboring countries as well. Is that – you know, it's usually one of those things of until it actually affects you,
56:24
you kind of act oblivious of what is going on, and I think that is what is happening. Until it actually directly affects us, probably that's when we'll begin to make decisions and think about the future. I think I will just say the same about is Africa learning lessons from the ease of countries like China?
56:46
You know, China is all over the place in Africa. They're building roads, they're doing infrastructures, they're giving us loans that our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will be paying for. Yes, we are learning, but we're not learning the positive lessons from them. We are learning all the bad things.
57:01
We are trying to find a way of becoming as restrictive as they are, but also not looking like we are as restrictive as they are. So every day we see people who are monitoring us. Every day, even on Facebook, you see strange friend requests,
57:23
and like now the government intelligence agencies do that. They send people friend requests on Facebook, they follow you on your Twitter timeline. Personally, I know that all my phone lines are tapped. It's common procedure for journalists in Kenya and local bloggers to have their phone lines tapped.
57:45
So we are always under constant monitoring with somebody just waiting for you to say the wrong thing or post the wrong thing. Those are the sort of lessons that I think they are learning from the restrictive regimes in the East.
58:02
Just briefly, lessons from China and Iran. Yes, most African governments are looking everywhere, not just China and Iran. They're looking at NASA, they're looking at all of these other examples as to how best to manage this phenomenon called the Internet and especially when it affects political consciousness,
58:22
political activism, and exposes government corruption. Wait is used as a tool in those respects. So yes, they look everywhere, not just China and Iran, also other countries that have any broad plans to surveil, to curtail, among other things. The second point, which I'm just going to make a general point on,
58:41
about connections with mainstream civil society. The media and bloggers and social media activists tend not to have a direct link with mainstream civil society as of old in African countries, mainly also because civil society doesn't quite take to social media
59:01
as much as it should or the Internet as much as it should. And this is a challenge where sometimes civil society stands back and says, oh, that's a media problem or that's a blogger's problem or that's not necessarily our collective problem. Yet the right to freedom of expression and access to information, as well as the right to the Internet, is everyone's right.
59:23
Let me just quickly say for the conclusion that from my point of view, I think the comparison to Asia is a very instrumental one because we don't want to have an Asian situation on the African continent. And when it comes to the freedom of expression in the digital space, Africa has a battleground right now, as we can see with the input that we got from our panelists.
59:43
Governments are aware of the Internet, they are trying to control it, but at the same time the laws are not yet in place. There's a very active civil society, there's a very active blogger's sphere, and I think we as a global community have to do everything that we can in order to support the actors on the African continent that provide...
01:00:00
access to information that improve exchange of opinion and our Africa bloggers are some of them so I would like to thank you very much for your contributions Ruth, Daniel and Tekoura, big hand for them and and I would also
01:00:24
like to thank you in the audience for staying with us for asking all those questions and yeah I hope that you will now maybe bookmark Africa blogging org and follow what those three and the others are doing and coming up with in the next few weeks and months. Thank you so much.