National cohesion, ethnicity and privacy under spotlight

The National Cohesion and Integration Commission (NCIC) has been monitoring our cellular phone-disseminated text messages and other online communications.

The Commission has been accused of invading our privacy. Others consider this an act of trampling free expression and restraining the free flow of information.

This concern is not solely Kenyan. The US government has failed to implement remarkable privacy policies laid during the reigns of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter.

But with the perceived dastardly role the media and new communication technologies played in fanning political animosity and national and ethnic polarisation in 2007, to what extent should we expect the government to ensure unrestrained flow of competing voices without injuring national cohesion?

National cohesion has distressed and goaded Kenya since independence. It remains elusive, partly, because of the complexity generated by the cornucopia of languages and dialects, which serve as essential ethnic markers.

But as Aaron Karnell argues in his study on the role of radio in the genocide in Rwanda, ethnic identity “is essentially a modern invention of ethnic elites and intellectuals pursuing economic and political objectives.”

As a discursive construct that is centred on boundary formation, ethnicity is vulnerable to manipulation by self-serving hegemons who, in ethnic-stratified societies like ours, include ethnic chieftains and hired propagandists.

The existence of ethno-political conflicts and contestations of hegemony indicate how the perceived hegemonic interests fall short of the ultimate hegemonic status, and their failure to nourish the move toward normative capitulation.

This has lead to an emergence of other voices and facets – socio-political class, ethnicities and ethnic allegiance - which have resisted attempts at normative tendencies of the perceived ethno-hegemonic interests.

This is the background against which the NCIC should analyse the messages it is collecting, especially because we have sanctioned ethnicity as a negotiating tool in our competition for political positions and their imaginary dividends.

Robert Sternberg shows how such power struggles generate intense hate, encouraging the use of every means to foment hate in order to gain support.

By spying our online activities, NCIC will only be exposed to citizens’ expressions of an existing adversarial position, which is now being expressed at a mutative intersection of technological explosion, market and social change.

NCIC should focus on not just how Kenyans have adopted the use of new communication technologies, but also on how that adoption has changed their communication behaviour. Societies change when its members change the way they communicate.

The potent communication being scavenged for by NCIC is not in messages themselves but in the meaning imbued with them.

To understand these gathered messages, NCIC needs to examine the context within which they are constructed and deployed.

But the context of deployment is not static. It is fluid and transient, influencing how messages are propagated, transmitted and decoded. A different context with a different form of information warfare will characterise 2012. NCIC can only learn from 2007 but prepare differently for 2012.

The 2007 tragedy shows how disseminated messages only became potentially injurious upon saturation with a ferocity that was driven by political competition with damaging ethnic overtones. These same messages had provided comic relief by satirising ethnic stereotypes before the elections.

Grievances

It is ludicrous to assume the grievances expressed by these messages emerged in 2007. These grievances have been with us since independence.

The Kenyatta and Moi regimes suppressed expressive and discursive spaces so punitively that these grievances festered for decades.

Although these discursive spaces existed, they were either rendering mute or demonising.

They were stifled through narratives that erroneously constructed our nation’s success as dependent on silencing and criminalising alternative voices.

New technologies have disordered that restrictive information environment. NCIC cannot blame technology for the demise of privacy, which is a civil rights issue.

Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis examined the intersection of privacy and technology in their Harvard Law Review article, suggesting the utility of “right of privacy” to protect “the right to be left alone.” But that was in 1890.

There are other concerns: who will be accessing the database where these messages will be stored? Under what circumstances will access be granted? How will NCIC avoid introduction of false data? What analytical approaches will NCIC use to interpret these messages? Michel Foucault’s historical discourse analysis, or combine it with membership categorisation analysis?

By accessing our mobile phones, NCIC is challenging the assumption that these devices are primarily personal, thereby calling for a re-conceptualisation of the contemporaneous ideology of privacy.

Such, simultaneously, is the sensitive and profound role of NCIC.

Dr Wachanga is a journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin.