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What’s #Trending in Pastoralist Kenya?

10 min read.

Research by SPARC provides a snapshot of social media trends in pastoralist Kenya and gives a sense of social media’s potential for civic participation, e-commerce and community resilience in the drylands.

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What’s #Trending in Pastoralist Kenya?
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You may be familiar with the common myths about drylands—that they contribute little to biodiversity and food systems, that they are unproductive and unworthy of political and economic investment, and their inhabitants are most responsible for this degradation. In the last thirty years, scholars, activists, and other actors have offered comprehensive counter-arguments and counter-narratives to these misconceptions. Here are a few facts: nearly half of the African continent is comprised of drylands ecosystems; twenty million pastoralists and agro-pastoralists live in the drylands of the Horn of Africa; in Kenya, arid and semi-arid lands are 80 per cent of the country’s landmass, inhabited by nearly ten million people. Researchers show that traditional pastoralism is likely one of the most adaptive productive strategies for Africa’s rangelands. There is much to learn from the flexibility and innovation of the resource-efficient communities that are sustaining pastoralism as a resilient livelihood.

Still, vulnerability in the drylands is rising. This is due to a complex mix of factors, including climate change and the economic fallout from COVID-19. Disruptions to the food supply chain together with continued drought—likely the worst in 40 years—are putting lives and livelihoods at risk. In Kenya, the World Food Programme has warned that half a million people are currently on the brink of a hunger crisis, and the number of Kenyans requiring assistance has quadrupled in two years. As governments, community leaders, and humanitarian agencies respond to urgent crises, we must resist longer-term proposals solely predicated upon sedentarization. The agro-centric and teleological perceptions informing these “solutions” are at best incomplete, and destructive at worst. Such a narrow view of pastoralist systems obfuscates the sophisticated social technology which undergirds them. Pastoralism’s core capability of “boosting and amplifying process variance with real-time management strategies and options” enables pastoralists—Emery Roe’s pithy “reliability professionals”—to identify and test new ways to sustain livelihoods uniquely well in contexts of high uncertainty. The system behind such rapid feedback loops of identifying, assimilating and responding to variability and risk is radical. When the source and paths of uncertainty are inconceivable and resulting changes incommensurate— in other words, when even the illusion of prediction and control is impossible— then coping reactively is a moot option. Settled societies would do well to apprentice with pastoralists on “coping ahead”.

Collective ownership and shared labour, in pasture surveillance and livestock protection for example, make long-term resource management through mobility viable. This is what doctoral researcher Tahira Shariff terms the “moral economy” underpinning pastoral production. Shariff cites the Borana proverb “borani wali waheela amalle walii wareega” to illustrate the individual’s loyalty to the group: “I exist because you exist”. Once we fully dispel the correlating myths of pastoralists as culturally outmoded Luddites, isn’t it clear that this is an innovative and sophisticated pastoral (social) technology?

While an important contribution to the popular and policy narratives on pastoralism, cogent explorations of this social technology could also guide other urgent issues of livelihood vulnerability, governance, conflict, and shared resource management. Practically: are early warning tools designed for pastoralist communication strategies? Is how drought is perceived, and talked about, central to drought management projects? How does group decision-making function, and can it be influenced, say to resolve conflicts among pastoralist communities? How and where (or with whom) are inherited pastoralist insights on climate forecasting preserved? Are livelihood decisions affected by changing social networks and hierarchies?

Recent work coalescing around this is exciting: Dr Jaro Arero and Dr Hussein Tadicha make the case for integrating indigenous knowledge for climate information. Community radio stations—Like Fereiti FM, the first Rendille language station in Marsabit—are driven by citizen reporting like that behind the Kenya Pastoralist Journalist Network. Yusuf Ibrahim highlights how the use of indigenous language has enabled community radio to become a reliable source of information. An example of the novel ways mobile phones extend the realm of social networks is the discovery in 2018 that Maasai pastoralists in northern Tanzania create new social ties through wrong number connections on their phones.

The material and emotional benefits of belonging to a social network, whatever the channel, are immense. The varied aspects linked to the pastoral technology of relating to each other and their ecosystem can be simplified as a factor of communication. Ongoing research under the Supporting Pastoralism and Agriculture in Recurrent and Protracted Crisis (SPARC) programme finds that social media, mostly through mobile phones, is the fast-growing corollary to community radio in pastoralist Kenya. Social media opens up further possibilities to better understand and learn from the communication strategies pastoral communities use to update and transmit their knowledge within social networks. Ingrid Boas, for instance, recently explored how pastoralists in Laikipia use basic phones, smartphones, social media platforms, virtual herding and other combinations of physical and digital strategies.

Maasai pastoralists in northern Tanzania create new social ties through wrong number connections on their phones.

In SPARC’s research project, the varied exchanges (information, products, and care) possible across radio, phone, and social media platforms set the stage for a focused exploration of the nature and extent of social media use in the drylands, how social media might influence information campaigns and product marketing, and how those new livelihood opportunities could be best tailored for pastoralists. We have partnered with Wowzi, which provides a platform building on social capital and the trust of regular social media users to spark conversation about products, services and information. Since its launch in 2018, Wowzi has enrolled over 50,000 influencers running over 15,000 social media campaigns in seven African countries.

The numbers are in: pastoralists are connecting through social media

SPARC research led by Nendo Advisory synthesises key figures—on Internet penetration, mobile network quality, device affordability, gender-based access to mobile phones and the Internet—with qualitative evaluation of audiences and conversations into a snapshot of social media trends in pastoralist Kenya. We have an initial understanding of who is using which social media platforms, in what ways, and hypotheses explaining these patterns. Importantly, we now have a sense of social media’s potential for civic participation, e-commerce and community resilience in the drylands.

Pastoralist use of mobile phones and Internet is growing, but so might the gender gap 

Mobile phones have become integral to the lives of many pastoral communities. In Kenya’s arid and semi-arid lands (ASALs), the percentage of households using a mobile phone at least once a year increased from 45 per cent in 2009 to more than 80 per cent in 2015. Similar diffusion rates are observed elsewhere. Broadly in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), mobile subscription grows 4.6 per cent per year on average. The Global System for Mobile Communications (GSMA) expects SSA to record over 600 million mobile subscribers—approximately half the population—by 2025. The economic potential is significant; in 2018 alone, for instance, mobile technologies and services in SSA generated US$144.1 billion, roughly 9 per cent of the region’s GDP. Even with these gains, SSA’s mobile Internet coverage gap is more than three times the global average.

Mobile phones have become integral to the lives of many pastoral communities.

Major 3G and 4G rollouts in West and East Africa have resulted in a five percentage-point reduction in the coverage gap between 2019 and 2020. More than a quarter (28 per cent) of the population in the region are now using mobile Internet—doubling the usage level in 2014. The coverage gap is amplified in the drylands. In Kenya, for example, there is 63 per cent mobile ownership in the drylands but Communications Authority data reveals that only 3 to 16 per cent of these owners use their mobile devices to access the Internet. Feature phones continue to dominate because of affordability, durability and battery life. Financing plans such as Safaricom’s Lipa Mdogo and second-hand markets are enabling drylands customers to shift to entry-level smartphones. However, with this change, smartphone users in these regions—and digital content and service providers—must navigate the triad identified by Nendo elsewhere: Bundles, Battery, and Bytes. Given their core capability as “reliability professionals”, pastoralists may be uniquely adapted to the flexible improvisation required in rationing bundles, for instance.

Source: Nendo Advisory
2G and 3G tend to underpin the mobile network infrastructure on the continent, and the rise of 4G is unevenly distributed—in Uganda, for example, rural and drylands areas are locked out of the 4G clusters.

Source: Global System for Mobile Communications (GSMA)

The mobile phone’s portability, and the capability for oral communication lends itself well to transhumance. Drawing on recent research, Nendo identifies specific ways pastoralists currently use mobile phones: exploiting information and communication services in herd management to gain information on water resources and forage, weather conditions and veterinary services—researchers have found that a small proportion of pastoralists in Isiolo, Wajir and Marsabit are exploring mAgriculture; virtual herding where “elite pastoralists” use mobile phones to access information on their herds and make payments for labour and inputs, among other uses; obtaining market information by exchanging updates on livestock prices and volumes; contacting medical assistance and veterinary or extension services as well as providing local health workers with information on population structures, pregnancy outcomes and migration patterns; acting as warning systems by exchanging information on hotspots for conflict, such as banditry, or sightings of dangerous animals; pastoralists in East Africa have, for example, used phones to warn each other of sightings of dangerous animals, thus reducing human/animal conflict.

Pastoralists’ use of mobile phones is also contributing to community growth and participation through social connection—keeping in touch with family and relatives (and even making new ties through “wrong number connections”) through audio calls and voice notes; through trading and finance—making payments, and accessing credit; through activism and politics, particularly the use of WhatsApp groups that share videos and voice recordings as well as live-streaming national TV channels on YouTube; and in local and regional planning where phones are used to provide authorities or project planners with information to support evaluation and improvement of programmes or services.

Certainly, variance in infrastructure such as consistent grid electricity and cellular networks constrains the frequency and extent of mobile usage. Importantly, despite growth in mobile phone ownership, gender parity in Internet access lags behind in several countries. As in other regions, a gender gap persists as women have lower access to devices and Internet use. Unfortunately, the Covid-19 pandemic triggered a retraction of some of those gains in technology access for women.

Source: Global System for Mobile Communications (GSMA)

Source: Global System for Mobile Communications (GSMA)

Maasai women in northern Tanzania, however, illustrate the possibilities of redressing the mobile phone gender gap. They are using phones to keep in contact with hired herders, as a tool in organising their home duties, and as a way to collectively advocate for their rights to education, among others. Here, the mobile phone’s radical potential lives on. Regrettably, social media platforms reflect and amplify the gender gap. For example, Facebook is popular in Kenya but 60 per cent of the membership is male, and half the Facebook population is based in the capital city.

What is happening in pastoralist digital communities?

How else are pastoralist communities utilising those precious call minutes and mobile data? Launched in their 2019 The State of Mobile Data report, Nendo’s 5S’s framework remains one of the continent’s reference points in capturing and explaining behaviour around Internet data usage: Search—with Google as Africa’s most visited website and Google’s Android as the #1 smartphone by market share, search is a mainstay of the online experience; Sport—Sports betting has taken on a meteoric rise in the last eight years. Using mobile money (M-Pesa) in particular, this vice has led to millions coming online and participating in deeper ways, consuming sports-related content with football dominating; Social—Facebook is Kenya’s largest social network with over 11 million users. Facebook is only outranked by instant messaging app WhatsApp. Instagram tends to rank high as a leading visual social network alongside newcomer (but fastest-growing) TikTok. Twitter maintains influence but remains mainly used by urbanites; Sex—in many African countries (with almost no exceptions) adult websites rank in the top 10 most visited websites; Stories—YouTube, local blogs/vlogs, mainstream media, and content creators are emerging as a crop of African storytellers and publishers create content and grow audiences. 

SPARC’s working hypothesis is that the drylands have a similar consumption breakdown, inflected by connectivity levels. Nendo notes that streaming of local and international music may be a favoured pastime, if the number of drylands creators in YouTube’s “Trending” section is any indication.

Online behaviour can further be understood by analysing the types of people that use the Internet. Nendo’s 5S’s framework explains what happens on the Internet, while the Kantar/TNS framework explains why and how the online users spend their time on the Internet. Functionals are limited by data, Observers have time and data but don’t post. Connectors post often but are limited by megabytes and time. Leaders and Super Leaders create the content.

Types of people that use the Internet

Types of people that use the Internet

Also referred to as the “Wikipedia Rule”, the 90-9-1 rule states that 90 per cent of users will be “lurkers” who do not engage (observe but do not contribute, like, retweet, share, or engage). Nine per cent will be contributors who observe and occasionally contribute while 1 per cent are the heavy contributors and creators. In the drylands, like elsewhere, content creators range from influencers with large followings to micro- or nano-influencers across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. Like citizen journalists and storytellers using community radio in pastoralist regions, these social media users are circumventing any language barriers tied to global platforms by creating content in their own languages. According to Wowzi’s typology, only a small fraction of creators will be “super influencers” and the greatest membership and audience of social media platforms is users with less than 300 followers.

As a corollary to the Wikipedia rule, the engagement rates for large creators tend to be lower as their numbers of lurkers tend to weigh higher and lower the engagement scores of the contributors. Wowzi’s core insight is that audiences find their connections with fewer follower counts (“nano-influencers”) to be more trustworthy content creators than more established celebrity brands. This nano-influencer segment might be an untapped engine of social capital. Since its launch in 2018, Wowzi has enrolled over 50,000 influencers running over 15,000 social media campaigns in seven African countries. It may be cause for celebration, then, that nano-influencers are the largest segment of social media users in the drylands.

Could social listening influence pastoralist futures?

What’s trending on Facebook among the 59,000 users in Garissa, or the 43,000 in Isiolo? The patently false myths of pastoralists as low-tech or anti-tech notwithstanding, the global push for transparency and accountability from Big Tech and social media platforms is justified. After failing to stop the dissemination of paid hate speech in Myanmar, Ethiopia, and around the Kenyan elections, Facebook came under pressure to tackle election disinformation ahead of the Brazilian elections in October 2022. As TIME magazine’s recent exposé Inside Facebook’s African Sweatshop and Quartz Africa’s series on the gig economy show, platform capitalism and digital work—jobtech—is far from utopian. Gig work is subject to the same inequalities in offline or traditional labour markets—whether informally on social media or governed by e-markets like Jumia. Even so, when the Nigerian government bans Twitter, or Ethiopia and Uganda shut down the Internet, their actions reflect a recognition and fear of their digital citizens’ collective power. Certainly, Kenyans on Twitter—#KOT—continue to show the power social media has for connection, group mobilisation and advocacy. In forecasting the livelihood potential of social media, SPARC’s 2021 report, Resilient Generation, offers recommendations on supporting young people’s prospects for decent work in the drylands of East and West Africa.

It may be cause for celebration, then, that nano-influencers are the largest segment of social media users in the drylands.

Imagine activating pastoralist digital communities in marketing dryland-specific services, in intra-pastoralist organising, and regional advocacy. Practical campaigns testing this model could inform how innovation and resilience are calibrated by dryland inhabitants themselves, while challenging technology providers to transform their platforms and offerings to integrate flexibility and inclusion more broadly. To do so well, we require analytical frameworks, specialised analysts and computing power—or, social listening technology. We could use such tools to monitor online conversations and collect publicly available data from different social media networks, highlighting broader demographic information as well as audience sentiment to drive meaningful engagement. Apart from SPARC’s current partnership with Wowzi, we could not identify any other social listening technologies designed for or applied in pastoralist regions.

In the interim, politicians and leaders can use social media to complement their engagements with historically marginalised populations, such as those in northern Kenya. Like Wowzi, more businesses could explore opportunities to acquire new staff and customers in pastoralist regions through similar channels. Global investment is primed to scale such commitments. The United Nations declared 2026—three years from now—the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists. 102 countries and 308 organisations now support the IYRP! 2021 kicked off the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration.

We welcome your suggestions and examples for social media in the drylands. You might start with SPARC’s digital dashboard mapping over 40 innovative solutions designed with and for pastoralists and agro-pastoralists in Arid and Semi-Arid Lands (ASALs) and Fragile and Conflict Affected States (FCAS). In addition to addressing immediate shocks and stresses, we are keen to hear what innovations, including those leveraging social media, could stimulate and sustain economic and other well-being outcomes for pastoral communities over the long-term.

SPARC, a programme of Cowater, ODI, the International Livestock Research Institute and Mercy Corps, aims to generate evidence and address knowledge gaps to build the resilience of dryland pastoralists and farmers to the effects of climate change.

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Alexis Tayie is a writer and researcher based in Nairobi, Kenya.

Politics

‘Crush and Grind Them Like Lice’: Harare Old Guard Feeling Threatened

With the launch of the Citizens Coalition for Change, Zimbabwe’s political landscape has undergone a significant shift, with a younger activist generation increasingly impatient with the unfulfilled promises of liberation.

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‘Crush and Grind Them Like Lice’: Harare Old Guard Feeling Threatened
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On the 26th of February 2022, Zimbabwe’s Vice President delivered a chilling threat to the opposition. In a speech the “retired” army general Constantino Chiwenga, the chief architect of the November of 2017 putsch that removed Robert Mugabe, threatened that the opposition will be “crushed and ground on a rock like lice”. The General claimed that the ruling party was a “Goliath”; the Biblical imagery of the diminutive David “slaying” the giant Goliath was entirely lost on the Vice President. Here are his words:

“Down with CCC. You see when you crush lice with a rock, you put it on a flat stone and then you grind it to the extent that even flies will not eat it… But we are as big as Goliath we will see it [the opposition] when the time comes”.

The following day violent mayhem broke out in Kwekwe, the very town where the fiery speech was made. By the time the chaos ended, the opposition reported that 16 of their supporters had been hospitalised and it was recorded that a young man was sadistically speared to death. The supporters of the ruling party had taken the threat to “crush” and “grind” the opposition seriously. Details emerged—from the police—that the suspects were from the ruling party and had tried to hide in a property owned by a former minister of intelligence.

The launch of the Citizens Coalition for Change (CCC) has galvanised the opposition. Going by the youthful excitement at the rallies, the violence flaring against its supporters, and the way the police has been clamping down on CCC rallies, the ruling elites have realised they face a serious political threat from what has been called the “yellow” movement.

Exit Mugabe and Tsvangirai: Shifts in opposition and ruling class politics

The death of opposition leader and former prime minister Morgan Tsvangirai in February 2018 came in the wake of the November 2017 coup and other significant political events that followed. The death was a big blow to the opposition; there had been no succession planning, which was rendered more complex by the existence of three vice presidents deputising Tsvangirai. The MDC Alliance succession debacle set in motion a tumultuous contest that splintered the opposition. Court applications followed, and the ruling elites took an active interest. When the court battles ended, the judiciary ensured a “win” for the faction favoured by the ruling class. That faction was formally recognised in parliament, given party assets and provided with financial resources by the Treasury that were meant for the opposition.

As for the ruling party, there has been a shift in the political contests along factional lines, accentuated following the death of Robert Gabriel Mugabe in September of 2019. There is high suspicion that the 2017 coup plotters (generals and commanders) now want their proverbial “pound of flesh”—the presidency. With the presidency as the bull fighter’s prize, the factions are now lining up either behind the president or the behind generals and this is cascading through the ruling party structures. The historical faction known as G40 (Generation 40) that hovered around the then first lady has been practically shut out of political power, with its anchors remaining holed up outside the country. Remnants of the G40 faction in Zimbabwe have been side-lined, with some of them subjected to the endless grind of court processes to ensure they keep their heads down.

Yet another element has emerged, that of a president who feels besieged and is re-building the party and executive positions in the image of his regional ethnic block, bringing into the matrix a potent powder keg waiting to explode in the future.

The ruling party has gone further to entice Morgan Tsvangirai’s political orphans in order to decimate the leadership ranks of the opposition. Patronage is generously dished out: an ambassadorial appointment here, a gender commissioner position there, a seat on the board of a state parastatal…, and so on. These appointments come with extreme state largesse—cars, drivers, state security, free fuel, housing, pensions and the list goes on. The patronage also includes lucrative gold mining claims and farms running into hundreds of acres that come with free agricultural inputs. The former opposition stalwarts must be “re-habilitated” by being taught “patriotism” at a Bolshevik-like ideological school and then paraded at rallies as defectors to ZANU-PF.

Yet another element has emerged, that of a president who feels besieged and is re-building the party and executive positions in the image of his regional ethnic block.

As these political shifts take place and the opposition divorces itself from the succession mess, there are also changes in Zimbabwe’s economy and this has a direct impact on the trajectory of politics in the country.

Transformed political economy: Informality, diaspora and agrarian change  

From about the end of the 1990s and stretching into the subsequent two decades up to 2022, Zimbabwe’s political economy has shifted significantly. Firstly, the fast-track land reform of the early 2000s altered land ownership from white settler “commercial” farmers to include more black people. The white-settler class power was removed as a factor in politics and in its place is a very unstable system of tenure for thousands of black farmers that have been married to the state for tenure security and stability.

Secondly, the follow-on effect of the land reform meant that Zimbabwe’s industrial base was altered, and this has resulted in a highly informalized economy or what others have called the “rubble”. An informal economy is now the new normal across the board for ordinary citizens and this has weakened organized labour as a voice in political contests. In 2020, the World Bank estimated extreme poverty at 49 per cent; this is infusing a sense of urgency for political change and is putting pressure on the political elites in Harare.

Thirdly, the exodus of Zimbabwe’s younger population into the diaspora has introduced another factor into the political matrix. According to official figures, the diaspora transferred about US$1.4 billion in 2021 alone, but this figure doesn’t capture remittances that are moved into Zimbabwe informally; the figure is much higher. The diaspora has actually used its cash to have a political voice, often via the opposition or independent “citizen initiatives”. It is proving to be a significant player in the political matrix to the extent that Nelson Chamisa has appointed a Secretary for Diaspora Affairs. For its part, the ruling party has blocked the diaspora vote.

Fourth, the national political economy has been “captured” by an unproductive crony class to the extent that researchers have estimated that as much as half of Zimbabwe’s GDP is being pilfered:

“It is estimated that Zimbabwe may lose up to half the value of its annual GDP of $21.4bn due to corrupt economic activity that, even if not directly the work of the cartels featured in the report, is the result of their suffocation of honest economic activity through collusion, price fixing and monopolies. Ironically, President Emmerson Mnangagwa, who has been a public critic of illicit financial transfers, is identified by the report as one of the cartel bosses whose patronage and protection keeps cartels operating.”

Fifthly, and often under-researched, is the substantial role of China across Zimbabwe’s political economy as Harare’s political elites have shifted to Beijing for a closer alliance. This has paid handsomely for China which has almost unrestrained access to Zimbabwe’s natural resources, and the political elites are “comrades in business” with—mostly—Chinese state corporations; China’s influence is pervasive and evident across the country. Put together, the factors above mean that the political economy structure has changed significantly and it is within this landscape that the Citizens Coalition for Change—dubbed the “yellow movement” — that has been launched by the opposition will have to operate and organise.

‘Yellow Movement’: Re-articulating the future beyond the ‘Harare Bubble’? 

Since its launch, the opposition movement has swept into the CCC’s ranks the younger demographic of activists together with some solid veterans who survived the brutal years of Robert Mugabe’s terror. Zimbabwe’s median age is reported to be about 18 years of age; if these young people can register, turn out to vote and defend their vote, there is a whirlwind coming for the old nationalists in Harare.

Some within the ruling party have noticed this reality, with a former minister and ruling party member stating that “Nelson Chamisa is gaining popularity because the ZANU PF old guard is fighting its own young men and women”. This admission is consistent with the words of Temba Mliswa, another “independent” member of parliament and a former leading activist in the ruling party, who stated that:

“The generational approach is like you trying to stop a wave of water with your open hands. You cannot ignore it. It’s a generational issue. You cannot ignore it. You need to look at it. You need to study it… There is no young person in ZANU PF who is as vibrant as Chamisa, who is as charismatic as Nelson Chamisa. Chamisa is going to go straight for ED (President Emmerson Mnangagwa)… There is no gate preventing this.’

These admissions are an indication that the CCC movement poses a serious threat to the ruling party. But beyond the contest of politics, of ideas, of policy platforms, the “yellow movement” will have to divorce itself from the “Harare Bubble”. The ruling nationalists polished a rigid centralised political system inherited from settler-colonialism, and have used this to build a crony network of robbery based in the capital city while impoverishing other regions. But they are not alone in this; even the opposition has often overlooked the fact that “all politics is local” and it has also created a “Harare Bubble” of yesterday’s heroes and gatekeepers who, armed with undynamic analyses, continue to cast their shadows into the arena long after their expiry date.

“Nelson Chamisa is gaining popularity because the ZANU PF old guard is fighting its own young men and women”.

The yellow movement will have to go local and divorce itself from the parochial legacy of previously progressive platforms that have now been cornered by an elite who have become careerist, corrupt, inward-looking and, like civil warlords, only loyal to imported 10-year-old whisky bottles and their kitambis—their visibly ballooning stomachs.

Yet there is no ignoring it; Zimbabwe’s youth have been emboldened by political change in Zambia and Malawi, and by the rise of younger leaders in South Africa. The winds are blowing heavily against the status quo. In the 2023 general election, the ruling nationalists will face a more tactful, daring and politically solid Nelson Chamisa who has strategically pushed back against “elite pacts”. Added to his eloquence, his speeches are getting more structured, substantially more polished, and he is projecting the CCC movement as a capable alternative government. With the indelible footprints of Morgan Tsvangirai in the background, the next general election, in 2023, will be an existential contest for Harare’s old nationalists—they are facing their Waterloo.

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Politics

The Dictatorship of the Church

From the enormously influential megachurches of Walter Magaya and Emmanuel Makandiwa to smaller ‘startups,’ the church in Zimbabwe has frightening, nearly despotic authority.

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The Dictatorship of the Church
Photo: Aaron Burden on Unsplash.
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In Zimbabwe, the most powerful dictatorship is not the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) party. Despite the party’s 40 year history of ruthlessly cracking down on opposition parties, sowing fear into the minds of the country’s political aspirants, despite the party’s overseeing of catastrophic policies such as the failed land reform, and despite the precarious position of the social landscape of the country today, neither former president Robert Mugabe, nor the current president Emmerson Mnangagwa, nor any of their associates pose as significant an existential threat to Zimbabweans as the most influential dictatorship at play in the country: the church.The church has frightening, near despotic authority which it uses to wield the balance of human rights within its palms. It wields authority from enormously influential megachurches like those of Walter Magaya and Emmanuel Makandiwa, to the smaller startup churches that operate from the depths of the highest-density suburbs of the metropolitan provinces of Bulawayo and Harare. Modern day totalitarian regimes brandish the power of the military over their subjects. In the same way, the church wields the threat of eternal damnation against those who fail to follow its commands. With the advent of the COVID-19 vaccine in 2020, for example, Emmanuel Makandiwa vocally declared that the vaccine was the biblical “mark of the beast.” In line with the promises of the book of Revelations, he declared that receiving it would damn one to eternal punishment.

Additionally, in just the same way that dictators stifle discourse through the control of the media, the church suppresses change by controlling the political landscape and making themselves indispensable stakeholders in electoral periods. The impact of this is enormous: since independence, there has been no meaningful political discourse on human rights questions. These questions include same-sex marriage and the right to access abortions as well as other reproductive health services. The church’s role in this situation has been to lead an onslaught of attacks on any institution, political or not, that dares to bring such questions for public consideration. But importantly, only through such consideration can policy substantively change. When people enter into conversation, they gain the opportunity to find middle grounds for their seemingly irreconcilable positions. Such middle-grounds may be the difference between life and death for many disadvantaged groups in Zimbabwe and across the world at large. The influence of the church impedes any attempt at locating this middle ground.

Additionally, because the church influences so many Zimbabweans, political actors do not dare oppose the church’s declarations. They fear being condemned and losing the support of their electorate. The church rarely faces criticism for its positions. It is not held accountable for the sentiments its leaders express by virtue of the veil of righteousness protecting it.

Furthermore, and uniquely so, the church serves the function of propping up the ZANU-PF party. The ZANU-PF mainly holds conservative ideals. These ideals align with those of the traditionalist Zimbabwean church. In short, the church in Zimbabwe stands as a hurdle to the crucial regime change necessary to bring the country to success. With a crucial election slated for the coming months, this hurdle looms more threatening than at any other time in the country’s history.

The impact of the church’s dictatorship on humans is immeasurable. Queer people, for example, are enormously vulnerable to violence and othering from their communities. They are also particularly vulnerable to sexually transmitted diseases and infections due to the absence of healthcare for them. The church meets the attempts of organizations such as the Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe to push for protection with cries that often devolve into scapegoating. These cries from the church reference moral decadence, a supposed decline in family values, and in the worst of cases, mental illness.

Similarly, the church meets civil society’s attempts at codifying and protecting sexual and reproductive rights with vehement disapproval. In 2021, for example, 22 civil society organizations petitioned Parliament to lower the consent age for accessing sexual and reproductive health servicesCritics of the petition described it as “deeply antithetical to the public morality of Zimbabwe” that is grounded in “good old cultural and Christian values.”

Reporting on its consultations with religious leaders, a Parliamentary Portfolio Committee tasked with considering this petition described Christianity as “the solution” to the problem posed by the petition. This Committee viewed the petition as a gateway to issues such as “child exploitation … rights without responsibility … and spiritual bondages.” The petition disappeared into the annals of parliamentary bureaucracy. A year later, the Constitutional Court unanimously voted to increase the age of consent to 18.

A more horrifying instance of this unholy alliance between the church and the state in Zimbabwe is a recently unearthed money laundering scheme that has occurred under the watchful eye of the government. Under the stewardship of self-proclaimed Prophet Uebert Angel, the Ambassador-at-Large for the Government of Zimbabwe, millions of dollars were laundered by the Zimbabwean government. Here, as revealed by Al Jazeera in a four-part docuseries, Ambassador Angel served as a middleman for the government, facilitating the laundering of millions of dollars and the smuggling of scores of refined gold bars to the United Arab Emirates. He did this using his plenipotentiary ambassadorial status to vault through loopholes in the government’s security systems.

Importantly, Prophet Angel was appointed in 2021 as part of a frenetic series of ambassadorial appointments. President Mnangagwa handed out these appointments to specifically high-profile church leaders known for their glamorous lifestyle and their preaching of the prosperity gospel. Through these appointments, Emmerson Mnangagwa’s government earned itself a permanent stamp of approval from the church and access to a multi-million member base of voting Christians in the country. Mnangagwa’s gained access to freedom from accountability arising from the power of the endorsements by “men-of-God,” one of whom’s prophetic realm includes predicting English Premier League (EPL) football scores and guessing the color of congregants’ undergarments.

In exchange, Prophet Angel has earned himself a decently large sum of money. He has also earned the same freedom from critique and accountability as Zimbabwe’s government. To date, there is no evidence of Angel ever having faced any consequences for his action. The most popular response is simple: the majority of the Christian community chooses either to defend him or to turn a blind eye to his sins. The Christian community’s response to Prophet Angel’s actions, and to the role of the church in abortion and LGBTQ discourse is predictable. The community also responds simply to similar instances when the church acts as a dialogical actor and absolves itself of accountability and critique

Amidst all this, it is easy to denounce the church as a failed actor. However, the church’s political presence has not been exclusively negative. The Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace, for example, was the first organization to formally acknowledge Gukurahundi, a genocide that happened between 1982 and 1987 and killed thousands of Ndebele people. The Commission did this through a detailed report documenting what it termed as disturbances in the western regions of the country. Doing so sparked essential conversations about accountability and culpability over this forgotten genocide in Zimbabwe.

Similarly, the Zimbabwe Bishops’ Justice and Peace Commission has been involved in data collection that is sparking discourse about violence and human rights abuses in Zimbabwe. In doing so, the Commission is challenging Zimbabweans to think more critically about what constructive politics can look like in the country. Such work is hugely instrumental in driving social justice work forward in the country. What uniquely identifies the church’s involvement in both of these issues, however, is that neither touches on matters of Christian dogma. Instead, the Commission responds to general questions about the future of both God and Zimbabwe’s people in ways that make it easy for the church to enter into conversation with a critical and informed lens.

The conclusion from this is simple: if Zimbabwe is to shift into more progressive, dialogical politics, the church’s role must change with it. It is unlikely that the church will ever be a wholly apolitical actor in any country. However, the political integration of the church into the politics of Zimbabwe must be a full one. It must be led by the enhanced accountability of Zimbabwean religious leaders. In the same way that other political actors are taken to task over their opinions, the church must be held accountable for its rhetoric in the political space.

A growing population has, thus far, been involved in driving this shift. Social media has taken on a central role in this. For example, social media platforms such as Twitter thoroughly criticized megachurch pastor Emmanuel Makandiwa for his sentiments regarding vaccinations. This and other factors led him to backtrack on his expressed views on inoculation. However, social media is not as available in rural areas. There, the influence of the religion is stronger than elsewhere in the country. Therefore investments must be made in educating people about the roles of the church and the confines of its authority. This will be instrumental in giving people the courage to cut against the very rough grain of religious dogma. Presently, few such educational opportunities exist. To spark this much-needed change, it will be useful to have incentivizing opportunities for dialogue in religious sects.

More than anything else, the people for whom and through whom the church exists must drive any shift in the church’s role. The people of Tunisia stripped President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of his authority during the Jasmine Revolution of January 2011. The women of Iran continue to tear at the walls that surround the extremist Islamic Republic. In just the same way, the people of Zimbabwe have the power to disrobe the church of the veil of righteousness that protects it from criticism and accountability.

In anticipation of the upcoming election, the critical issues emerging necessitate this excoriation even more. This will open up political spaces for Zimbabweans to consider a wider pool of contentious issues when they take to the polls in a few months. Above all, the people of Zimbabwe must start viewing the church for what it is: an institution, just like any other, with vested interests in the country’s affairs. As with any other institution, we must begin to challenge, question, and criticize the church for its own good and for the good of the people of Zimbabwe.

This post is from a partnership between Africa Is a Country and The Elephant. We will be publishing a series of posts from their site once a week.

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Pattern of Life and Death: Camp Simba and the US War on Terror

The US has become addicted to private military contractors mainly because they provide “plausible deniability” in the so-called war on terror.

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Pattern of Life and Death: Camp Simba and the US War on Terror
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Though it claimed the lives of three Americans, not 2,403, some liken the January 2020 al-Shabaab attack at Manda Bay, Kenya, to Pearl Harbour. The US would go on to unleash massive airstrikes against al-Shabaab in Somalia.

“We Americans hate being caught out,” a spy-plane pilot and contractor recently told me. “We should have killed them before they even planned it.”

Both the Manda Bay and Pearl Harbour attacks revealed the vulnerability of US personnel and forces. One brought the US into the Second World War. The other has brought Kenya into the global–and seemingly endless–War on Terror.

Months before launching the assault, members of the Al Qaeda-linked faction bivouacked in mangrove swamp and scrubland along this stretch of the northeast Kenyan coast. Unseen, they observed the base and Magagoni airfield. The airfield was poorly secured to begin with. They managed not to trip the sensors and made their way past the guard towers and the “kill zone” without being noticed.

At 5.20 a.m. on 5 January, pilots and contractors for L3Harris Technologies, which conducts airborne intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) for the Pentagon, were about to take off from the airfield in a Beechcraft King Air b350. The twin engine plane was laden with sensors, cameras, and other high tech video equipment. Seeing thermal images of what they thought were hyenas scurrying across the runway, the pilots eased back on the engines. By the time they realized that a force of committed, disciplined and well-armed al-Shabaab fighters had breached Magagoni’s perimeter, past the guard towers, it was too late.

Simultaneously, a mile away, other al-Shabaab fighters attacked Camp Simba, an annex to Manda Bay where US forces and contractors are housed. Al-Shabaab fired into the camp to distract personnel and delay the US response to the targeted attack at the airfield.

Back at the Magagoni airfield, al-Shabaab fighters launched a rocket-propelled grenade at the King Air. “They took it right in the schnauzer,” an aircraft mechanic at Camp Simba who survived the attack recently recalled to me. Hit in the nose, the plane burst into flames. Pilots Bruce Triplett, 64, and Dustin Harrison, 47, both contractors employed by L3Harris, died instantly. The L3Harris contractor working the surveillance and reconnaissance equipment aft managed to crawl out, badly burned.  US Army Specialist Henry J Mayfield, 23, who was in a truck clearing the tarmac, was also killed.

The attack on Camp Simba was not the first al-Shabaab action carried out in Kenya. But it was the first in the country to target US personnel. And it was wildly successful.

AFRICOM initially reported that six contractor-operated civilian aircraft had been damaged. However, drone footage released by al-Shabaab’s media wing showed that within a few minutes, the fighters had destroyed six surveillance aircraft, medical evacuation helicopters on the ground, several vehicles, and a fuel storage area. US and Kenyan forces engaged al-Shabaab for “several hours”.

Included in the destroyed aircraft was a secretive US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) military de Havilland Dash-8 twin-engine turboprop configured for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions. A report released by United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) in March 2022 acknowledges that the attackers “achieved a degree of success in their plan.”

Teams working for another air-surveillance company survived the attack because their aircraft were in the air, preparing to land at Magagoni. Seeing what was happening on the ground, the crew diverted to Mombasa and subsequently to Entebbe, Uganda, where they stayed for months while Manda Bay underwent measures for force protection.

I had the chance to meet some of the contractors from that ISR flight. Occasionally, these guys—some call themselves paramilitary contractors—escape Camp Simba to hang out at various watering holes in and around Lamu, the coastal town where I live. On one recent afternoon, they commandeered a bar’s sound system, replacing Kenyan easy listening with boisterous Southern rock from the States.

Sweet home Alabama! 

An ISR operator and I struck up an acquaintance. Black-eyed, thickly built, he’s also a self-confessed borderline sociopath. My own guess would be more an on-the-spectrum disorder. Formerly an operator with Delta Force, he was a “door kicker” and would often—in counter-terror parlance—“fix and finish” terror suspects. Abundant ink on his solid arms immortalizes scenes of battle from Iraq and Afghanistan. In his fifties, with a puffy white beard, he’s now an ISR contractor, an “eye in the sky”. His workday is spent “finding and fixing” targets for the Pentagon.

Occasionally, these guys—some call themselves paramilitary contractors—escape Camp Simba to hang out at various watering holes in and around Lamu.

He tells me about his missions—ten hours in a King Air, most of that time above Somalia, draped over cameras and video equipment. He gathers sensitive data for “pattern of life” analysis. He tells me that on the morning of the attack he was in the King Air about to land at the Magagoni airstrip.

We talked about a lot of things but when I probed him about “pattern of life” intel, the ISR operator told me not a lot except that al-Shabaab had been observing Camp Simba and the airstrip for a pattern of life study.

What I could learn online is that a pattern of life study is the documentation of the habits of an individual subject or of the population of an area. Generally done without the consent of the subject, it is carried out for purposes including security, profit, scientific research, regular censuses, and traffic analysis. So, pattern-of-life analysis is a fancy term for spying on people en masse. Seemingly boring.

Less so as applied to the forever war on terror. The operator pointed out the irony of how the mile or so of scrubland between the base and the Indian Ocean coastline had been crawling with militant spies in the months preceding the attack at Camp Simba. Typically, the ISR specialist says, his job is to find an al-Shabaab suspect and study his daily behaviours—his “pattern of life.”

ISR and Pattern of Life are inextricably linked

King Airs perform specialized missions; the planes are equipped with cameras and communications equipment suitable for military surveillance. Radar systems gaze through foliage, rain, darkness, dust storms or atmospheric haze to provide real time, high quality tactical ground imagery anytime it is needed, day or night. What my operator acquaintance collects goes to the Pentagon where it is analysed to determine whether anything observed is “actionable”. In many instances, action that proceeds includes airstrikes. But as a private military contractor ISR operator cannot “pull the trigger”.

In the six weeks following the attack at Magagoni and Camp Simba, AFRICOM launched 13 airstrikes against al-Shabaab’s network. That was a high share of the total of 42 carried out in 2020.

Airstrikes spiked under the Trump administration, totalling more than 275 reported, compared with 60 over the eight years of the Barack Obama administration. It is no great mystery that the Manda Bay-Magagoni attack occurred during Trump’s time in office.

Typically, the ISR specialist says, his job is to find an al-Shabaab suspect and study his daily behaviours—his “pattern of life.”

Several al-Shabaab leaders behind the attack are believed to have been killed in such airstrikes. The US first launched airstrikes against al-Shabab in Somalia in 2007 and increased them in 2016, according to data collected and analysed by UK-based non-profit Airwars.

Controversy arises from the fact that, as precise as these strikes are thought to be, there are always civilian casualties.

“The US uses pattern of life, in part, to identify ways to reduce the risk of innocent civilian casualties (CIVCAS) (when/where are targets by themselves or with family) whereas obviously Shabaab does not distinguish as such and uses it for different purposes,” a Department of Defense official familiar with the matter of drone operations told me.

The Biden administration resumed airstrikes in Somalia in August 2021. AFRICOM claimed it killed 13 al-Shabaab militants and that no civilians were killed.

According to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, Mustaf ‘Ato is a senior Amniyat official responsible for coordinating and conducting al-Shabaab attacks in Somalia and Kenya and has helped plan attacks on Kenyan targets and US military compounds in Kenya. It is not clear, however, if this target has been fixed and killed.

A few days after the second anniversary of the Manda Bay attack, the US offered a US$10 million bounty.

The American public know very little about private military contractors. Yet the US has become addicted to contractors mainly because they provide “plausible deniability”.  “Americans don’t care about contractors coming home in body bags,” says Sean McFate, a defense and national security analyst.

These airstrikes, targeted with the help of the operators and pilots in the King Airs flying out of Magagoni, would furnish a strong motive for al-Shabaab’s move on 5 January 2020.

The Pentagon carried out 15 air strikes in 2022 on the al-Qaeda-linked group, according to the Long War Journal tracker. Africom said the strikes killed at least 107 al-Shabaab fighters. There are no armed drones as such based at Camp Simba but armed gray-coloured single-engine Pilatus aircraft called Draco (Latin for “Dragon”) are sometimes used to kill targets in Somalia, a well-placed source told me.

The US has become addicted to contractors mainly because they provide “plausible deniability”.

The contractor I got to know somewhat brushes off the why of the attack. It is all too contextual for public consumption, and probably part of army indoctrination not to encourage meaningful discussion. He had, however, made the dry observation about the al-Shabaab affiliates out in the bush near the airfield, doing “pattern of life” reconnaissance.

The strike on Magagoni was closely timed and fully coordinated. And it appears that the primary aim was to take out ISR planes and their crews. It was private contractors, not US soldiers, in those planes. I pointed out to the operator that those targets would serve al-Shabaab’s aims both of vengeance and deterrence or prevention. His response: “Who cares why they attacked us? Al-Shabaab are booger-eaters.”

With that he cranks up the sound, singing along off-key:

And this bird, you cannot change

Lord help me, I can’t change….

Won’t you fly high, free bird, yeah.

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