Social media rant showed we are a bunch of hypocrites

I can take it when an army of Kenyans on twitter come out to rally nationalist sentiment and unleash a torrent of disparaging hashtags at CNN for depicting our country as a hotbed of terror ahead of US president Barack Obama’s visit.

My country is evolving into a hotbed of social media bullies who are known to take no prisoners on the virtual battlefield after all.

And in our latest collective Obama stupour, nothing, not least unflattering media coverage, must stop us from putting a show of patriotism, even if it means faking it.

Apart from the routine victories by our athletes in long-distance races, we haven’t had a lot else to go gaga about recently.

The national rugby association is broke, and so the Sevens team — the darling of the middle class fans and wannabes — hasn’t brought back much joy from its usual international stomping grounds.

And, the national soccer team Harambee Stars? Aha, those ones never beat anyone.

The picture gets even clearer when you throw in our legendary high tolerance for mediocrity, which makes us cheer on corrupt and inept leaders simply because they belong to our tribes and compare our national security to that of the worst of the worst, like Iraq, Somalia, Syria and Libya.

Indeed, it is a testament to Kenyans’ tendency to settle for the short end of the stick from the rulers that some of us still think ours is a safe haven despite being the easy target of bloody terrorist attacks in recent times.

Well, even that I can take.

FAMILIAR SCRIPT

What I find revolting is the sight of people in authority whose job it is to protect us from the terrorists in the first place taking the social media mob attack on CNN as an invitation to mark out yet another scapegoat for official ineptitude.

As if to give official seal to the anti-CNN backlash on twitter, Maj-Gen (rtd) Joseph Nkaissery, the Interior Cabinet Secretary, called a press conference on Thursday evening in which he condemned the media network and demanded an apology for its reporting “based on lies and without verification”.

Of course, the Interior Cabinet Secretary’s rants were consistent with a familiar script that has seen the Uhuru Kenyatta administration go after the media almost every time it has been put under public scrutiny for national security failures.

Remember that this government infamously attempted to give itself powers to edit media stories on terrorism through the Security (Amendment) Laws and was only rebuffed by the High Court decision which struck out sections of that law that were found offensive to the Constitution in February.

Watching the Interior Cabinet Secretary on TV, it was clear that the government is still hungry for scapegoats and strangely believes the media should follow the twitter crowd in creating a fantasy safe haven here in which Garissa, Mandera, Mpeketoni, and Westgate never happened.

Otieno is Chief Sub-Editor, Business Daily; [email protected]; Twitter: @otienootieno