The social media is a major source of nightmare to political leaders across Africa and beyond, the Executive Director, Media Rights Agenda, MRA, and Board Chair, Media Foundation For West Africa, MFWA, Mr. Edetaen Ojo, has declared.
Ojo who spoke on Thursday at the opening ceremony of this year’s West Africa Media Excellence Conference and Awards, WAMECA, convened by the MFWA holding at the Swiss Spirit Alisa Hotel, Accra, Ghana.
WAMECA is a flagship project of the MFWA to promote and reward media excellence in the West African sub-region.
The theme of this year’s conference is “Social Media, Fake News and Elections in Africa.”
Ojo highlighted that as the number of internet users in many African countries have grown over the years, so had the emergence of new class of citizens.
The citizens, he noted, were increasingly interested in public policy issues and had become quite engaged and vocal in the political arena.
“They engage online, leaning heavily on social media platforms. This is causing anxieties for political leaders on the continent with the result that many of them are actively seeking ways to regulate social media and suppress an increasingly engaged citizenry,” he said.
Giving an example of such suppression, Ojo said in 2011, Africa experienced its first internet shutdown ordered by a government, when the then Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, threatened by anti-government protests largely organised and sustained through social media, ordered a shutdown of the internet.
That, he said, had become a norm for many African leaders, while the weaponised practice trended throughout the continent.
Many African countries subsequently interrupt or limit access to telecommunication services such as the internet, social media and even messaging services particularly during elections.
He said in the past four years, about 22 African countries had reportedly experienced partial or total internet shutdown ordered by their governments.
“This is an issue that should clearly worry all of us,” said Ojo.
The Media Rights Agenda helmsman warned that the suppression would gradually spread across Africa given the tendencies of African governments at copying “worst practices” and grabbing ideas from each other on how to repress their citizens.
Such oppressive governments, he emphasized, were becoming quite lawless and emboldened.
They, according to him, would go unchallenged internationally for their negative human rights practices given the loss of global leadership from Western countries in the promotion and defence of freedom of expression.
“We must come up with countervailing measures to respond to this new reality, otherwise we are soon likely to witness democratic regression in our region or even across the continent, especially when you consider other legislative measures and administrative practices that our governments are adopting to shrink civic space in many countries,” he concluded.
