Is the KFCB useful?

Censorship does not work. Except in North Korea, maybe. What the Kenya Film Classification Board, which at one time was the Kenya Film Censor Board, attempted to do in 2014 regarding The Wolf of Wall Street, failed and failed on an epic scale. Of course the movie was a profanity-filled crass attempt at toilet humor, but there was no way Kenyans were going to watch it (save for that minority that watches absolutely everything) until the KFCB stepped it, declared that it wouldn't allow it to be screened on Kenyan cinemas, prohibited the fifty-bob DVD guys from selling it and generally promoted the crass bits of the movie.

Censorship failed in Stalin's Russia, in Mao's China, in Indira's India, in Suharto's Malaysia, in the Ayatollahs' Iran, and in Moi's Kenya. It will not work in the twenty first century because every attempt that has ever been made to limit what people can see, read, listen to or watch has failed. I am surprised that our digital government is obsessed with censorship in this day and Age - this is an Information Age.

Kenya seeks to be a developed country at some point in the next century. It will not achieve this goal if it stifles the free flow of ideas, even execrable ones like those found in the Wolf of Wall Street. To base its censorship on an ill-defined moral values' standard is to confirm that there are men and women in the government who simply have run out of fresh ideas and are instead building empires made up of rules and regulations that permit them to molest Kenyans almost will.

Look at the Wolf of Wall Street fiasco, for example. Immediately after Kenyans had wiped the tears from their eyes for laughing so hard, they found themselves an internet cafe with sufficient broadband bandwidth, created proxy servers or piggy-backed on the various Tor networks, downloaded the movie and cocked a snook at the KFCB. Kenya has one of the most advanced militaries in Africa, armed with some of the most sophisticated hardware in Africa, but it is governed by wingnuts who simply do not understand what the Information Age means and what we can gain from the free flow of information and knowledge. The KFCB is the epitome of deliberate ignorance in the ocean of information.

The KFCB lives under the false impression that pit is in the business of saving Kenyans from their moral failings and that it is responsible for saving the national Executive from public embarrassment. It is still living in the days of the Mwakenya Movement, when hundreds of Kenyans were brutally abused for publishing seditious material. The KFCB is an anachronism and we must rethink its usefulness.

Its latest power grab is truly bizarre. It is not the Communications Authority, so it cannot lawfully prevent any Kenyan from accessing content via the internet, dial-up telephone, satellite, telegram, telegraph, radio signal or TV broadcast signal. It can't even prevent Kenyans from receiving information by smoke signals! It is not the communications' regulator. It is responsible for regulating cinemas and theatres. That's it. Where it found the power to regulate internet content in the laws of Kenya remains a mystery only its chairman and CEO can explain. The KFCB's usefulness, I fear, is at an end.