Divided House in Cape Town

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THE INSIDE VIEW

The information revolution would make the rigging of elections impossible, the technology evangelists claimed. Cellphones would enable observers to send information about abuse instantly to headquarters and digital cameras would record voting malpractice and violence. Opening the airwaves to private FM radio stations would allow local journalists to reach communities in their own languages. Internet technology would mean that this digitised data and voting information, along with better informed press reports and political blogs, could be instantly relayed across a country. All this should have led to more political accountability. There is no doubt that the new technology helped ensure better elections in countries such as Ghana, Senegal, Mauritius, Zambia and Botswana. But in the middle of Kenya’s current crisis, the picture looks rather different. Accusations of heinous, electronically-assisted crimes buzz across the internet: militias organising operations by text message via cellphones; hate speech propagated in indigenous languages on local FM stations; and blogs that preach a poisonous message of land seizures and score-settling. New technology may have made it harder to steal elections, but it is also making it harder to deal with the consequences of a disputed poll. Electronic pluralism is good but the judicial and political institutions will have to work much harder to catch up with it.