NAIROBI, KENYA – AUGUST 8: Police detain demonstrators protesting against government tax restrictions in Nairobi, Kenya on August 8, 2024. (Photo by Gerald Anderson/Anadolu via Getty Images)
When young people in Kenya rebelled against the political establishment in June over planned tax increases, they turned to technology to organize themselves.
They built custom GPTs (artificial intelligence programs) to educate each other on the proposals, met in X-Space to plan protests, and even enlisted TikTok influencers to provide political education.
During the protests, they used walkie-talkie apps to coordinate their actions and mobile money to crowdfund medical costs for the injured.
This is Gen Z in action: civic engagement reimagined for the digital age.
But technology is a double-edged sword. The same digital infrastructure
The same powers that empower protesters can also be used to repress them. The Kenyan government appears to have used some tools from the dictator's digital toolbox in its response to June's unrest.
The authorities' first action was to shut down the internet on June 25, the first time such unrest had occurred in Kenya (the self-described “Silicon Savannah”), and it came just as protesters were about to storm parliament in Nairobi, according to internet watchdog NetBlocks.
As the protests intensified, journalists, activists and dissidents began to disappear.
CNN reported that these included at least 12 prominent social media users who were abducted by Kenyan security forces on the eve of the storming of Parliament.
Ramadan Rajab of Amnesty International Kenya said the abductees later described strange mobile phone behaviour before they were taken, cars waiting for them at their homes or regular haunts, and that the perpetrators quickly confiscated their phones once they had been taken.
These stories draw attention to the surveillance infrastructure Kenya has invested in over the years.
According to a 2023 study by Coda Story, there are about 2,000 police surveillance cameras on the streets of Nairobi. The Communications Authority of Kenya has a Device Monitoring System (DMS) that can intercept text messages and phone calls.
The agency ultimately secured the right to use DMS after a lengthy legal battle with activists who claimed it unfairly invaded their privacy.
Moreover, a 2017 study by Privacy International found that Kenyan intelligence agencies can directly eavesdrop on telecommunications networks without the knowledge of the carriers.
The accounts of abduction victims raise suspicions that a combination of these capabilities may have been used to target them.
When initial attempts at pacification failed to quell the protests, President William Ruto tried a more moderate approach, sparking a widely publicised online meeting with protesters called X-Space, where it all began.
He followed this with a complete reshuffle of his cabinet to show he was listening to the people, but his offers of reconciliation were ultimately ineffective and the turmoil continued.
A more insidious but familiar tactic has entered the fray: disinformation blaming foreign countries for domestic problems. At an event in Nakuru on 15 July, Ruto suggested Ford Foundation money was being used to fund “anarchy”.
The accusations, which offer no evidence and have been strongly denied by the Ford Foundation, did not initially cause much offline backlash, but that did not deter a small group of questionable social media accounts from promoting them.
The first post linking the Ford Foundation to the protests was published on June 23 by state official Sam Teresa.
There was a proliferation of more than 500 posts from accounts sympathetic to the Ruto administration, often using cherry-picked financial disclosures and doctored images from the foundation's website.
LGBTQIA+ organisations, human rights defenders and journalists have been blamed in the subsequent disinformation campaign.
Whether people believed these messages is of little importance: they distracted people, confused public debate, made the truth open to debate, and exhaustingly harassed key players who tried to counter the spread of deliberate falsehoods.
The protests in Kenya appear to have lost steam for now, with Ruto once again touring the country.
But the Kenyan government's actions over the past two months, left to politicians as a digital blueprint for countering surging protests across Africa, are casting a worrying shadow over Kenya's Silicon Savannah brand.
Government tactics have forced activists to take counter-measures.
“People are reducing their digital footprint, changing number or phones, restricting their communications to less popular apps like Signal or abandoning mobile phones altogether,” Amnesty's Rajab said.
The shift to encrypted apps shows that as states invest in more sophisticated surveillance, people are becoming more vigilant about privacy when using technology. Demand for virtual private networks in Kenya increased by 534% in the period immediately preceding June 25, according to Top 10 VPN.
This response reminds me of the bird in Chinua Achebe's proverb, which learned to “fly without stopping” after “man learned to shoot without missing.”
This article was first Continenta weekly newspaper distributed across Africa. Mail & GuardianDesigned to be read and shared on WhatsApp. Download the free version. here