June 2024 will remain the month Kenyans crossed the Rubicon on matters governance and accountability.
Indeed, almost a year after the protest, there is still a lot to rejoice about, especially on rights awareness and calls for leaders to be accountable.
In less than one year, not only was the Cabinet reshuffled, but we have seen Cabinet secretaries engaging the public more even as people have heightened civic education across the country.
However, and just like the Yoruba people warn us of the sweet soup that also burns the tongue, there might be one worrisome negative effect of the protest: The cancel or woke culture.
Unfortunately, the media, globally, has also been a victim. This culture of outrage has fostered an environment where balanced journalism is often undermined by aggressive online campaigns that seek to discredit dissenting voices rather than engage them.
Traditional media is increasingly pressured to conform to prevailing social narratives or risk being boycotted, “cancelled,” or labelled as ‘enemies’. Without doubt, this culture not only threatens press freedom but also erodes the public’s access to diverse viewpoints, and, consequently, weakening the core democratic principle of a free and pluralistic media.
For instance, in March 2021, Piers Morgan faced a media storm after questioning the veracity of claims by Meghan Markle during her interview with Oprah Winfrey, ultimately leading to his resignation from ‘Good Morning Britain’. Noteworthy, Morgan has been a vocal critic of what he describes as “woke culture,” which he argues silences honest discourse through fear and censorship.
I digress. The June protest, evidently, gave birth to alternative voices on matters leadership and governance with most of them enjoying a massive social media following. Unfortunately, these voices are turning social media to be an echo chamber of their current ideological positions and activism. Woe unto you if you have an active social media presence and you do not agree with the feelings or the sentiments of some of our current social media influencers.
And while it is the democratic right of anyone to criticise the political leadership and or any institution, what should concern all Kenyans is the fact that increasingly, activism is taking the form of misinformation, incitement, and online vigilantism. This is not accountability; neither is it civic engagement. This is chaos dressed up as activism, fueled by an imported woke culture that has already shown its destructive power in parts of the Western world.
Indeed, we all agree that criticism, oversight, and holding institutions accountable are healthy, even necessary, components of democracy. However, the calls for personal threats to leaders, destruction of property of institutions, and the weaponisation of digital platforms to erode trust in institutions without offering viable solutions, was never the desire of the youth that joined the protest in June.
Further, the well-designed social media attacks and vile sentiments shared through the platforms make one wonder whether those engaged in the current activism are seeking to reform institutions or destroy them.
One wonders whether there is a desire for meaningful change; or a resolve has been made to ‘burn, baby, burn’ so that we can later ‘build, baby build’.
The philosophies of resistance that have been described are similar to those that played out during the struggle for the rights and dignity of Black Americans in the civil rights era in the early 1960s, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr had different approaches to solving the matter.
On the one hand, Malcolm X advocated for self-defence and believed that non-violence in the face of violence was a sign of weakness and that blacks must seek justice ‘by all means necessary.’
On the other hand, King, inspired by Mahatma Gandhi, advocated for non-violence and civic disobedience and called for the blacks to ‘build, baby, build’, instead of ‘burn, baby, burn’.
In conclusion, it remains the responsibility of all social media influencers, and indeed all Kenyan youth in the digital space, to reflect on the power that comes with their influence, especially on social media.
By Bruno Otiato