Social Media as a Tool for Change in 21st
Century Africa: The of the 2011 Nigerian Elections
Presentation
made by Ololade Adewuyi, Online Editor, TELL Magazine to the Youth in
Leadership and Enterprise Initiative, YELI, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile Ife
on July 9, 2011
What is social media?
The world has truly
become a village unlike we have ever dreamed. When I was in my final year in
this university seven years ago, the word social media had only just begun to
evolve. It is on record that social media came into use just in 2004 and it is
a phenomenon that has changed the way we perceive our world today. You have
friends that you know many things about but have never met. You have family
members whom you have not spoken to in ages but you know when to wish them a happy
birthday. You have seen places where your legs might never tread on, all
through the internet. One big issue for all, the internet has come and
disrupted our lives in many positive ways that we wonder what we ever did
without it. We ask; how did we ever survive without our Facebook and our
Twitter? How did we get by, day by day, without communicating with our online
friends?
According to the Merriam
Webster dictionary, social media are “forms of electronic communications (such
as Web sites for social networking and microblogging) through which users
create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and
other content (as videos).” It’s the culmination of Web 2.0, the age of user
generated content on the internet.
When I was at Ife in the
early days of the millennium, the idea of googling up your assignment was only
just catching on. I remember our first attempt to use the net during a course
on Stylistics in my third year. We had no books in the library for the
particular topic that our tutorial teacher asked us to work on and someone
suggested going to the White House (Physics department) internet lab and see if
we could contact the author of the book to help us out. The author, Geoffrey
Leech, was based at a UK university and when one of us who was adept at the
working of the net googled his name we found an email address. It was a
triumph. The same student was the only one out of about ten of us who had an
email address so he sent a mail to the professor through it. We never got a
response but it was a big lesson for us all.
Pretty soon, I set up my
own email address through a friend’s help. There was a group on campus called
Yahooligans that was set up by fellow students to help in creating email
handles for everyone at a cost. I assure you they made a huge profit. This was
in 2002 when there were only about two or three cybercafés on this huge campus
and people had to queue for days to be able to secure browsing time at the
White House. I know it may sound incredulous to many of you here today. I’m
from that generation that paid through its nose and struggled to use the
internet. I wear my scars proudly.
The way we perceive our
world has changed. I have more than a thousand friends on Facebook, almost two
hundred followers on Twitter and more than a hundred thousand people have
visited my three blogs since I started the first one in 2007. My internet
footprint is more than the average Nigerian’s but still lags behind many of my
contemporaries in the West. However, in the near future, Africans will become
an integral part of the web culture as it is. Through increasingly affordable
mobile phones and internet services, young Africans will make their impact on
the net but we have to use that impact positively because there is no tool as
democratic as the internet and social media in our time.
In an article in Intelligent Life, JM Ledgard writes:
“Connectivity is a given: it is coming and happening and spreading in Africa
whether or not factories get built or young people find jobs. Culture is being
formed online as well as on the street: for the foreseeable future, the African
voice is going to get louder, while the voice of ageing Europe quietens.”
(‘Digital Life’, IL, Spring 2011)
The Arab Spring
The power of social
media was powerfully demonstrated in Africa for the first time during the
recent upheavals that took place in Tunisia and Egypt. Now famously known as
the Arab Spring, the riots against the tyrannical rule of Zine el Abidine Ben
Ali started when a trader Mohammed Bouazizi, set himself ablaze to protest his
shameful treatment by police officers in the town of Sidi Bouzid in Tunisia.
“It is a national tragedy when the youth - literally the future - commit
suicide to make a point,” wrote Larbi Sadiki in an opinion published by the Al Jazeera website.
The deaths of other
martyrs prompted demonstrations against the government, which it tried to
suppress by the use of force and banning state media from reporting. However,
the power of social media came in and Tunisians on ground began to put pictures
on Facebook and send in real time events via Twitter. Videos emerged on YouTube
of how protesters defied police batons and whips as they stormed government
offices demanding for better rules of engagement with the society. In a few
weeks, the 23 year-old government of Ben Ali was brought to its knees as he
capitulated and took off for exile in Saudi Arabia. Many of us followed the
proceedings of that revolution via the #sidibouzid
hash tag.
In Egypt, it was an eye
opening event. If people power could triumph in our neighbour’s enclave, why
not with us the biggest Arab country in the world? A Facebook group set up by
Wael Ghonim, a Google executive and blogger Abdel Rahman Mansour to mourn the
killing of Khaled Said, a 28 year-old Alexandrian by police officers took root.
They called for the end of police brutality. Soon after, Ghonim was
incarcerated leading to riots all over Cairo. When he was released, he called
for the almost 30 year-old authoritarian regime of Hosni Mubarak to resign and
that true democracy should be instituted in the country.
The events of those 18
days mean that Egypt will never remain like before. The Cairo that I visited in
2009 where huge billboards carrying the intimidating face of Mubarak has gone
and what we now have from the social change that occurred is a country of
better sure-footed people who will never be intimidated by booming guns and
emergency laws. The Egyptians in their turn inspired others in Libya, Bahrain,
Syria and Yemen to seek for change in the way they are being governed.
Nigeria Elections 2011
Young, tech savvy
Nigerians watched closely as the events in the Middle East unfolded as the
Nigerian general elections drew close. In an article published in TELL in January, I drew attention to the
work of Amara Nwankpa, an Abuja-based tech activist who set up a group called
Light Up Nigeria calling for the government to restore electricity to the
country. Using the Delta rerun in January as a test, Nwankpa on Election Day
tweeted all the actions on ground to his followers who were hungry for news
from the frontline. He beat many mainstream media to the announcement of
results and at the end of the day said that the main test was to come in the
general elections in April.
Even President Goodluck
Jonathan joined the social media frenzy by first announcing his intention to
contest on Facebook thereby taking the shine away from an opponent that held a
big announcement party on the same day. Everything was seemingly set for social
media to make a big impact in Nigeria during the countdown to the elections.
The group Enough Is
Enough Nigeria also campaigned broadly using Twitter and Facebook to rally
young people to go out and register to vote using the acronym RSVP i.e
Register, Vote, Select, Protect or what we generally refer to as rice and stew
very plenty. It caught on as many young people went to registration centres
armed with their mobile phones where they took photos of themselves and posted
on Twitter. The growing Nigerian Twitter community became abuzz with terms like
RV or Registered Voter as a status symbol. It was interesting to note that many
of these people were only voting for the first time ever even though many were
well past 18 years, the threshold for voter registration. In a country where
many people had great mistrust for the political class, the sudden vibe on
social networks made it cool for many to go out to exercise their civil rights.
The story of the
Nigerian elections in 2011 will not be complete without the impact social
networks played in galvanising young people to think that they could really
begin to make a positive change in the way their leaders are chosen. This in
effect also brought a change in the way politicians now perceive the
electorate. So on Election Day, they turned up at polling booths holding their
BlackBerry and other internet-enabled mobile phones where they tweeted
happenings on the scene using the #Nigeriadecides
hash tag. Photos of people voting and later results were sent onto the EiE and
Reclaimnaija.net aggregation platform.
It was not only young
people that caught on to the Twitter train, the mainstream media also tried to
match up in its own way through the use of the networks to share news. At TELL, we had our reporters nationwide
send in verified news reports via text messages that were posted on our website
and then tweeted to followers and shared on our Facebook page. It was a real
test of the traditional media’s readiness to move with the changing times. It
was not a battle between old and new, I think it was an effort to complement
each other. Where young people could be quick to declare results, traditional
media employed years of news wisdom to filter credible information to readers.
What we had was the most widely reported election in Nigeria’s history. Having
covered general elections in Ghana and Togo in the last two years, I am able to
say Nigeria has set a pace for other African countries in the use of social
media for electoral purposes even though only an estimated 70,000 voters used
social media in a recent report by the Social Media Tracking Centre.
The elections were not
without failings as new media pinpointed issues arising. The famous video about
massive thumb printing of ballot papers in Rivers state, underage voters in Bauchi and others
that emerged on YouTube showed the savvy of Nigerians. They have all become
evidence in court cases. And they show that Nigeria has moved a little away
from the era of massive rigging with impunity to an era where mobile phones
with cameras can make a big difference in how electoral crime can succeed or
fail. The gains of the last elections in Nigeria must be worked at to ensure a
freer and fairer electoral process for one and all. It is in doing this that we
can hope to ensure positive change in our society for our children and their
own children.
Using social media to
draw attention to social ills
The mobile phone that
you hold in your hand has changed the way we live. No longer is the endless
wait for NITEL to install a line in your home so that you can call your family
members in Europe or America. All you need is dial on your mobile. And now you
have to call your uncle before going to his house to ask for money for school.
The days are gone when you showed up at his doorstep unannounced. We used to
joke as kids that Africa was so simple that we did not have to call before a
visit. We used to frown at our ‘been-to’ folks who insisted one called before
coming even though they were the only ones who had landlines in the extended family. So
you had to use the public phone ahead of a visit. Good news is that everything
has become simpler. And so have the means to create change.
A website, a Twitter
handle and a Facebook page are modern tools of drawing attention to social ills
in our time. Change.org, a US-based site that prides itself as the biggest
online petition site in the world has about 3 million members worldwide. It has
pushed for the release of activists incarcerated in jails in China, it has
helped stall the deportation of immigrants in America and it has helped fight
for an end to rape as a cure to lesbianism in South Africa through the signing
of petitions online that have been pushed to high ranking government officials.
These can be replicated
in Nigeria as well. However, sites like Sahara Reporters have also helped to
bring focus on Nigerian government and corporate corruption in a way that main
stream media has not been able to. They call themselves citizen journalists and
that is the way to go for the future. Citizens can highlight major concerns in
their neighbourhood, in their local governments and states by creating blogs
that will show the world the happenings in their locality. It means that an
uncompleted road in Gbongan can be known to a resident of Accra. A lecturer
demanding bribe or sex for good grades in Ado Ekiti can be exposed to readers
in Kuala Lumpur. A government official who is intimidating his constituent can
be exposed to readers in New Foundland. A successful community project in Ilesa
can be monitored and replicated by a reader in Sally, Senegal.
The Twitter handle
@boycottdbanj gained massive following in just a few days of its appearance as
it criticised entertainer Dbanj for supporting the electoral bid of President
Jonathan. The persons behind it felt wronged by the fact that the entertainer
would use his popularity to campaign for a politician that they did not support
and they made their views known on the social media platform. The group later
changed to the handle @boycottpdp and you know what that means.
Today you do not need to
wait for a newspaper man to report your progress, even though newspapers are
always good for their spread and authenticity, you can always blog about it and
have people read you regularly. The internet is a democratic space and you will
be surprised at what people are searching for. TIME’s managing editor Richard Stengel puts it succinctly: “What social
media have done is to make us all more aware of what’s going on – and offer a
new avenue to organize opposition. We like to think revolutions arise from
below, but through most of human history, it’s the elites who have caused and
led revolutions. Now because of social media, anyone can communicate with
everyone. We’re seeing that in the Middle East, Africa and China. The
democratization of information may actually lead to real democracy.”
One thing that has to be
understood is that social media in itself does not make change. It is the
person behind the computer, the lady holding the Blackberry, the young man
hooking up to YouTube that makes change happen. It is from your mind that
change happens from where it is transferred to your network. It is your mind
first where the yearning for change begins. It is what you feed your mind with
that will feed your social network. Let change begin from your mind and let us
transform our community and our nation with it. It is the only way we can hold
everyone to account for the enormous trust we put in them.
Thank you all.
