IPRA NEWSLETTER

2011 • Volume 11 No. 1

Insights of the Journalism and Media Commission, January 11th-15th (Nairobi)

Dr. Duncan Omanga^[1]

The Journalism and media commission at the recently concluded IPRA conference in Nairobi featured interesting papers on journalism, digitality and democracy. Many of the papers focused on the Global South, with insights into Uganda, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia and the Ivory Coast. The papers covered the whole gamut of digitality in the continent-ranging

from shutdowns and internet policing, legal frameworks on cyberspace, decolonization and digitality, elections and trust, and the abiding discussion on disinformation and online hate speech.

On the first day, Dr. Emilly Comfort Maractho, a senior lecturer and Head of Department for Journalism and Media Studies at Uganda Christian University, provided a nearly prophetic insight into election and anxieties of the internet, just a day before Uganda went to the polls.

Top L to R: Dr Duncan Omanga, Prof. Rune Ottosen, Dr. Emilly Maractho, Dr Senthan Selvarajah

In this paper, Dr Maractho argued that government response (to the internet) in the 2016 elections had profound imprints for the 2021 electoral process. Indeed, the government of Uganda exploited the ongoing ‘Covid-19’ public health responses to mount an internet blockade, giving credibility to previous doubts on the fairness of the election. Afterwards, Dr Duncan Omanga, program officer of Africa Peace Network (APN) at the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), provided insights into how the last three elections in Kenya have shaped conceptions of digitality, through constructions of a techno-utopic state.

Using the last three major elections in Kenya, he examined how politics and digital media are dialectically shaped in the country. Taking a critical view, his paper revealed how digital media in Kenya’s post 1990s liberalized political culture furnished innovation, experimentation, digital humanitarianism, and more crucially how Kenya became a laboratory for disinformation and electoral interference abroad.

Abdulhakim Nsobya, a doctoral student at the University of Cape Town, looked at how Ugandan Facebook users in demonstrated contestation on the question of voting among Salafi-Muslim community, taking a deep dive into the relationship between democracy and Islamic law (sharia) among Salafis there. The paper explored the use of social media by contending Salafi groups in Uganda and their responses to the question of voting.

On the second day of the commission, Dr Bernadine Jones of University of Stirling presented a paper titled The “lack of listening” during South African election news coverage: ramifications for peace and democracy”. The paper revealed the problematic news framing and media organization in South Africa where news is mostly presented with pundits, prophets, and proclaimers, making it increasingly unlikely for audiences to independently assess the political landscape themselves, thus destabilizing participatory democracy. Dr Admire Mare, a journalism professor based in Namibia later on presented a paper titled “Digital Media, Elections and Manipulative Participation: Case study of Zimbabwe”. The scholar shed light on the various ways through which digital tools are weaponized and appropriated to produce and distribute misogynist discourses, disinformation and misinformation, which further polarizes and mobilizes highly ethnicised, patriarchal and toxic politics in Zimbabwe.

Dr Arsene Brice Bado, presenting on Ivory Coast’s Social media discourse, delivered a paper discussing “Social Media and Dangerous Speech in Political Discourse in Côte d’Ivoire”, where he explained the dynamics of dangerous speech in political discourse on social media in Côte d’Ivoire whilst exploring the conditions under which counter-speech through social media might be considered. Later that day, Dr John Githigaro, Kenyan scholar based at St Paul’s University, presented a paper on the controversial topic of elections observer missions. The paper titled “Assessing the ‘Credibility’ of the Kenya’s 2017 General Elections. A reading of select International Observers Missions ‘Digital Reports’ examined the EU observers’ mission and the US based Carter Center election mission reports on Kenya’s annulled 2017, probing how observer reports situated the ‘credibility’ of the August 2017 electoral outcome in Kenya.

Presenting his paper on Ethiopia’s digital media space on the third day, Prof Asnake Kefale’s paper titled “Digital Media, Political reforms, Elections and Peace” interrogated the political changes within the former ruling party, the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) since April 2018. Asnake observed that the 2015 protests that helped to bring the reforms were resilient and more organized in comparison to earlier protest movements partly because of the extensive use of the digital media. The digital (social) media not only helped to link diaspora-based opposition leaders (activists) and the youth protesters but also created a platform for collective action. As the commission sessions concluded, the focus shifted to Kenya, where Dr Jacinta Maweu from University of Nairobi examined how social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp) were used by citizens and politicians to spread disinformation and political propaganda during the 2017 general elections. Similarly, Job Allan Wefwafwa’s paper discussing “Technology, Public Confidence, Electoral Fraud: The Case of Kenya’s 2017 Presidential Elections” explored how technology in Kenya’s elections are used to instill public confidence rather than curb electoral fraudulence.

In conclusion, the papers presented in the media and journalism commission reveal that the digital space is not just a new space with new social realities, but an extension of the old realities that have dominated discussions of peace and security in the continent for ages.

[1] Dr. Duncan Omanga, Social Science Research Council, New York, USA