By JOACHIM BUWEMBO

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Like beauty, which is said to be in the eyes of the beholder, social media power seems to be in the hands of the phone holder.

Recent events in the region seem to suggest that an angry citizen with a smartphone could move the state to act in certain ways more than an angry state can make the citizen compliant by using the same social media.

But the party forcing the other party’s hand doesn’t have to be right or wrong, it is the identity of the party that matters.

Last week, an angry popular Ugandan cartoonist held an art exhibition — a virtual one powered by Twitter, depicting the shabby state of Kampala’s roads. This particular cartoonist is a known fierce critic of the government of the day.

Anyway, it was participatory, with the public invited to post pictures of potholed roads. But, in the emerging era of Artificial Intelligence, who could restrain angry people from presenting the potholes as they want them to be, not as they are?

So the “photos” rolled in, some showing white tourists mud bathing in soggy potholes. This being the era of fishermen (unpolished politicians) there were photos of fishing activities in the flooded potholes as well, including a man dragging out a Nile perch bigger than himself. There was some poetry as well, with someone posting that in Uganda we no longer drive on the left but on what is left!

Matters were getting out of hand when the government released a considerable sum of money to fix the city’s roads.

Videos of misconduct

This government reaction has been preceded by numerous others when it took prompt action after videos of misconduct were released by members of the public.

Child abusers have been apprehended, environment abuses have been halted. Even non-criminal acts like officials dozing off in public have been checked on the release of their images by members of the public.

This contrasts with a move last year that the police had started, compiling horrendous footage from the street cameras of boda boda riders and their passengers being killed on the roads. The stomach-churning police videos were being released at the end of the month, with “choice” crashes clearly showing how, in slow motion, the recklessness of the riders caused the sudden deaths.

You would have expected or at least wished that the jolted public would start demanding that the boda boda ride more carefully, or that the government bans the bike taxi industry, which has never been regularised in the first place.

Push for sanity

At the best, you would expect the people to push for sanity in the transport industry, which today is queerly dominated by the two wheelers that know no law, and seek the speedy encouragement of mass transport by prioritising buses and trains.

Instead, the public castigated the police for releasing the “shockingly distasteful” videos of the reality we live with. The monthly videos stopped, around about their third birthday.

Kampala’s boda boda got even more emboldened. Today, they race wildly on either side of the road, forcing oncoming cars and trucks to dodge them. The city roads look like a scene from a sci-fi horror movie.

The bodas are only challenged in notoriety by the 14-seater commuter vans that are often described as moving coffins, though this is unfair to the harmless coffins, which are neater. Like the boda boda, these mini buses are often driven by unqualified semi-employed urban jokers, who care nothing about safety.

Would the videos of the road massacres have been more effective if they had been initiated by the angry public? Maybe police should be advised that if they want to move the people to action, to give their videos to angry members of the public to post!

Buwembo is a Kampala-based journalist. E-mail: [email protected]