OVER the last decade, social media has gained increased popularity as a platform for information creation and exchange.
According to statistics drawn from the Global WebIndex, by July 2022, 4.70 billion people in the world (59 per cent) were using social media, with around 227 million people joining the online community within the last 12 months of that report.
Moreover, the average time spent on social media by individuals is approximately two-and-a-half hours a day.
This growth has been attributed mainly to mobile phone penetration and the lockdowns that happened during the Covid-19 period.
Interestingly, social media has therefore earned its position as the preferred source of news, with four in five adults turning to social media for news updates, compared with three in five who turn to television.
Africa has not been left behind, with over 384 million social media users as of 2022, with 56 per cent of the population in North Africa and 45 per cent in Southern Africa on social media.
The rise of social media usage in Africa has provided many opportunities, including giving many a medium to share a new narrative beyond the proverbial ‘dark continent’ through various initiatives and on different platforms.
Social media has facilitated business growth and impacted other critical sectors of African economies – politics included.
As much as the potential of social media has not been fully harnessed because of poorly developed or non-existent internet and data protection policies, African social media futures remain promising.
In a study seeking to investigate the critical role social media has played in redefining the engagement of citizens with critical national discourses in Kenya, particularly the Building Bridges Initiative constitutional reform process, the researchers established that social media usage has re-oriented political leadership in three main ways: access, accountability and political mobilisation.
First, with respect to access, social media has made otherwise inaccessible leaders available for engagement with their constituents and other citizens.
Social media has opened up ‘conversable spaces’ where citizens are able to deliberate with their leaders.
Digital conversable spaces, unlike the usual brick-and-mortar public participation channels, have also put the citizens in control of conversations and this is going as far as influencing the content and tone of traditional media conversations.
Second, social media has enhanced accountability because citizens are able to express dissent and seek answers to positions taken by national leaders.
In many of the online conversations, it was evident that keen citizens could put their leaders to task and have them explain decisions that impact the lives and communities of their electorate.
However, some of these calls for accountability have made political leaders uncomfortable and this led to internet shutdowns and restrictions in various parts of the continent.
Lastly, social media has earned a place in the politician’s repertoire as a tool for political mobilisation, especially in urban communities.
Online platforms are low-cost avenues for politicians to engage with the citizens, recruit members, organise events and drive engagement around critical issues of interest to them.
Most social media platforms also provide for polls that are opportunities used to test the popularity of concepts and opinions among the public.
In highlighting the ways in which social media has impacted leadership, the researchers were not blind to the negative effects of social media in political conversations especially pertaining to misinformation, mal-information and disinformation.
Moreover, the online-offline dynamic is a conundrum for many leaders in that online support does not always translate to commensurate offline support, where it actually counts.
However, these complexities of social media usage present opportunities for further research beyond the scope of the current research project.
This opinion piece is drawn from a research project, Reconceptualising the state through new media: a case of the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) in Kenya, under the African Leadership Centre (ALC) internal grant scheme funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. This study is aligned with Cluster 4 of the ALC Research Agenda: State-Society Relations.
