By Oscar Magu
Last week 45 Governors across the country took the oath of office after clinching the top seats in their respective counties in the just concluded general elections.
This year the list includes 30 newly elected Governors that are now in charge of shaping by-laws and supervising how billions of shillings in public spending will be allocated over the next five years.
For the majority of these relatively new faces in public office, social media continues to be a powerful platform to reach their constituents and spell out their colorful agenda.
In the run-up to the general elections, politicians vying for the various seats, deployed social media platforms including YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and TikTok to reach an electorate largely composed of voters younger than 35 years.
According to the Facebook Ad Library, more than Sh9.8 million was spent on ads about social issues, elections or politics between March 2021 and this month’s general elections.
As they assume office, it will work in their favor if they sustain these communicative structures set up during their campaigns, which will remain urgent as the electorate begins to demand delivery on promises their elected leaders made.
While Kenya’s private sector has clear strategies and tighter controls over the use of social media for advertising and brand sentiment promotions within companies, the same cannot be said of the public sector.
This is despite the fact that ministries, regulators, state corporations and departments host a lot of information key to developing policies affecting millions of lives.
In the recent past, however, the use (and misuse) of social media by some entities and individuals in the public sector has given the impression that state agencies still revel in hoarding information, working in silos and self-promotion.
Kenyans engaging with social media accounts belonging to government entities sometimes encounter unverified information and are most times ignored when they raise queries and are sometimes blocked for being critical.
Notwithstanding that blocking followers to a public social media account can be challenged in court under Section 5 of the Access to Information Act, the ubiquity of social media engagement today makes such a move self-defeatist.
While coming into office, President Uhuru Kenyatta relied heavily on Twitter to campaign and engage with Kenyans on Twitter, #KOT.
The president later deleted his account on the back of sustained criticism but his absence from the platform has not stopped those critics of his administration from voicing their concerns on Twitter and almost everywhere else.
With the vast majority of Kenya’s population under the age of 35 and as a generation of digital natives comes of age, the newly elected governors will have to develop robust social media policies that address the information needs of this demographic.
This is a mobile-first, actively engaged demographic that relies on social media as a primary source of news and information and presents both an opportunity and challenge for new governors.
In the first place, the pressure to respond in real-time to questions or concerns raised publicly on complex matters that might not have answers that fit in a 256 alphabetical character tweet will pose a challenge to new officials still learning the ropes.
On the other hand, social media platforms can help to unpack the legislative proposals that are often buried in nicely presented PDFs hidden in layers of unresponsive tabs on county government websites.
The COVID-19 pandemic normalized the notion that some processes previously considered cast in stone, like physically filing court submissions and attending hearings and AGMs, can be done virtually.
In the same light, there is no reason why a county government cannot accept public submissions to a new Bill through WhatsApp.
It is not just the electorate that is composed of a young demographic. The majority of the newly elected governors, senators and members of parliament are below 50 years old.
They are old enough to remember the progress made in easing communicative channels between the government and the citizenry over the past two decades and yet young enough to appreciate that more can still be done.
In social media, as in traditional media, content remains king and in the coming days and weeks, months and years, Kenyans will be scrolling to see in which direction their newly elected leaders will be steering.
Magu is CEO Maudhui House, a public affairs consultancy.
Email: [email protected]
