Botnets of shame.

There was a time in Kenya when photocopiers, then universally known as Xeroxes, were more or less controlled devices. Though it was not unlawful to own one, the Special Branch boys kept an eye on everyone who owned a Xerox. Then, information was tightly controlled; the idea that the government would find out about anything from the media was unheard of. As Charles Njonjo put it recently, "There is nothing that went on that we didn’t know about; we had the proverbial long arm of the law. We were always two steps ahead, we knew what conversation you had in your house the previous night...What happened in Garissa recently would never have happened because we had total control of security."

It is baffling that the heirs to the Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel Moi legacies do not appreciate that in the Digital Age, information control is a question of knowing which information to control and which one to let go. In the Digital Age, where everyone has a digital camera or a smartphone or both, information is collected and disseminated at a speed that is astounding. It is only a militaristic police state such as the People's Republic of China or the Democratic People's Republic of Korea that information can be controlled absolutely. The People's Republic and North Korea have devoted billions of dollars to the control of the generation, dissemination, nature and flow of information. Only the theocracies of Iran and Vatican City come close to such total control of information.

This is 2015. Xeroxes have proliferated, though by many accounts they are almost obsolete. This is the age of the internet and the dark web, social media and 128-bit encryption. Kenya has nowhere near the resources required to control information. Instead, it's government has attempted to control information by muddying the waters with botnets and slick propaganda. Its recent efforts have been an unmitigated disaster.

In its obsession with political messaging, the GoK has failed to grasp the nettle: in a relatively free political market, GoK is a minor player. It will always be outspent, outshouted and out-innovated by the hundreds of thousands of youth with itchy, idle fingers and no jobs. Instead, it should concentrate more on the information that must be controlled: public safety, national security, diplomacy, public finances. It should give upon trying to control the political propaganda landscape; that is the job of party aparatchiks and if Johnson Sakaja and his minions in TNA or Barre Shill and his minions in URP are incapable of this, they should hire somebody who is.

You get the sense though, that media houses and telecommunications companies are being insidiously co-opted into the GoK's plans to control what information is available to the people, the most recent attempt at this being the multibillion shilling security cameras contract awarded to a leading telecom company. It relies on the fibre-optic network through which much of the internet traffic in Kenya passes. Could this be a plot to commandeer the fibre-optic network in the name of "national security" while in reality it will be for political reasons?

Botnets and fake social media accounts are fine if you are a political hack at wits end, but they are a signal even to your enemies that your government's public communications policies have failed to take into account what the national interests are. It can be seen, as Macharia Gaitho points out in his commentary this week, in long-winded presidential addresses that send the audience to sleep and fail to communicate effectively what it is the government wants to do or what it really wants to achieve. And that is truly a shame for a government that describes itself as a digital government.