By ELSIE EYAKUZE

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The other day I was minding my business when I came across this tweet that recounted how my President Doctor John Pombe Magufuli (Phd not MD) congratulated a foreign emissary for not using Twitter to make statements about Tanzania, encouraging them to tell their fellow ambassadors to practise similar restraint. I was amused, but it is a valid reaction and made me think about the challenges of being a public figure governing in the 2020s.

I like social media. I worry that many people don’t know that they only make up a fraction of online life. Their overwhelming reach gives them power, but if you are aware of it you can manage it for your own good.

Case in point: years ago Facebook started this thing of offering itself for ‘free’ around the world when people bought Internet packages for their mobile phones. At present in Tanzania, there are social media packages that ONLY let you access major social media platforms and not the rest of the Internet.

These are mobile companies dictating how you consume information at a “reduced” or “affordable” price. It is brilliant marketing and penetration, and it has led to many users thinking that this is the be-all and end-all of online experience.

You can see how the echo chamber effect and the misinformation pandemic might arise if the only thing that people use online is social media platforms. We get our news from there, often curated because it has been sent to us by vested interests on the basis of our so-called ‘character.’

Too much of the same dumbed-down Internet diet is not good for our brains. We get herded away from the Internet’s true value as a vast and complex repository of information. That’s how we end up believing strange things, becoming easier to manipulate and paranoid.

In this situation it is easy to vilify social media in particular and the Internet in general as “bad.” At its worst it can result in users swimming in a cesspit of manufactured dreck and storming the sacred institutions of their country because an anonymous online stranger told you to. But we must remember that tools aren’t bad, it is the people using them who need watching. Which brings me to my next issue and biggest beef: state surveillance.

President Doctor John Pombe Magufuli (PhD not MD) recently told public servants to reign in their behaviour in ‘private’ communications on social media because he can see what they are up to and some of it is not kosher in his opinion.

Folks, it is one thing to know that you live in a surveillance state, it is another thing entirely to have it confirmed in such detail by your head of state. The delicate balance created by silence and plausible deniability of privacy violations has been breached, with consequences.

Having gotten over my disappointment that we can’t even keep our spying secret, and side-stepping the moral and constitutional implications of this, I have come to appreciate some of the good in this “transparent” attitude. The thing about social media and the online life is that it is a two-way interaction and that is what gives it immense political potential.

Tanzania’s formal channels of public discourse and debate have been severely curtailed through hostile legislation for the past five and more years. One would think this would solve the ‘problem’ of civic critique and peaceful dissent but one would be wrong. Critique and dissent are a natural, healthy and necessary function of the body politic.

Now that we know for sure that the state is reading our conversations and encouraging us to snitch on each other, guess what? We also have a foolproof way of sending messages and expressing opinions directly to the state, exploiting their thirst for ‘security’ and control.

Case in point: for months now, the official stance of the government has been that Tanzania does not have Covid-19. To add insult to injury, the government made it kind of illegal for individuals or non-approved institutions to issue public statements or statements in public about the disease affecting Tanzanians or being in Tanzania. You can see how this created a problematic situation.

I worried that this would stall matters but I should have known better. If anything, recent weeks have seen an upsurge in posts as well as activism about the actual situation on the ground.

Certain diseases care not for political parties nor egos, race or culture, economic stature — they are equalisers in misery. As I type this, my President Doctor John Pombe Magufuli (Eng) has finally admitted to the possibility of Covid-19 being present in the country, which I know because I am looking at my social media.

It took hundreds of years for Gutenberg’s invention to become an integral part of mass literacy. The telephone was only put together in 1876 and your electronic computer and smartphone don’t have a century on them yet.

Other than maybe to encourage us to embrace the revolution these platforms have brought to our public life in a positive way while being aware of our loss of privacy, I don’t have much to say definitively about this new dispensation.

It is too early in the process.

But l do like social media. At its best, it can change policies for the better and help save lives.

Elsie Eyakuze is a consultant and blogger for The Mikocheni Report: E-mail: [email protected]