In Kenya, Election Manipulation Is a Matter of Life and Death

[Geza Ulole]

In Kenya, Election Manipulation Is a Matter of Life and Death
Social media amplifiy the threat posed by Cambridge Analytica and the rest of Africa’s secretive political-consulting industry.
By Nanjala NyabolaTwitter
YESTERDAY 6:30 AM

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  Election officials from the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission work on computers in the Jamuhuri High School tallying center in Nairobi, Kenya, on August 9, 2017. (Reuters / Thomas Mukoya)
  
  
  ethnonationalist rhetoric, proliferated. Key terms on search engines like Google were manipulated so that the first result in a query for opposition candidate Raila Odinga would lead to a website either supporting President Kenyatta or attacking Odinga.
  
  Privacy International has reported that Kenyatta’s Jubilee Party paid Cambridge Analytica $6 million for its services for the 2017 election. But Odinga’s opposition coalition hired Aristotle, an American data firm, to work on his campaign, a detail revealed after Kenyan authorities arrested John Aristotle Phillips, the CEO of Aristotle, in Nairobi and deported him a day before the vote. He claimed to have been driven around Nairobi for three hours by government agents and forced to watch “snuff and torture videos” on a laptop before being put on a flight out of Kenya. Aristotle maintains that his company’s work in Kenya was restricted to standard analytics and public-relations consulting, though details are scant.
  
  Likewise, many of the details regarding Cambridge Analytica’s work in Kenya remain secret, although The Observer’s recent disclosures about the firm’s dealings in Nigeria in 2015 offer clues. Hired by a wealthy Nigerian businessman who did not want the incumbent, Goodluck Jonathan, to lose, Cambridge Analytica adopted a toxic set of tactics. “It was voter suppression of the most crude and basic kind,” said a former contractor retained by the firm. This meant Islamophobic ads that threatened sharia law, violence, and anarchy across the country should presidential candidate Muhammadu Buhari win. Cambridge Analytica staff confirmed that at one point the firm brought in Israeli hackers who had procured private information about Buhari, including health records and e-mails, in order to compromise his candidacy. Buhari won the election, but the skills Cambridge Analytica honed in 2015 could then be used elsewhere.
  
  In Kenya the “Real Raila” campaign, owned and managed by a still unidentified group, used similar tactics in the lead-up to the 2017 election. In a series of short videos, the unnamed group labeled Odinga “Lord of war” and “Lord of poverty,” promising chaos in Kenya should he win the election. Harris Media, a Texas corporation, was identified as the source of this video. Several more circulated online, particularly on the messaging service WhatsApp, owned by Facebook.
  “We put information into the bloodstream of the Internet and then watch it grow,” Turnbull told the Channel 4 reporters in the secretly recorded video. In Kenya, that “growth” meant that an already fraught election was underscored by intense ethnic polarization. Anecdotally, a friend—highly educated, middle class—once told me she was genuinely afraid of an Odinga victory, because she thought he was determined to massacre her ethnic group, based entirely on information that she had seen online.
  
  This hints at another piece of the problem: The data mined by Cambridge Analytica allows the firm to target its message to small groups of people so that we are not all consuming the same information. This targeted advertising turns political conversations insular and heated, makes it easier to disseminate misinformation, and poisons the political discourse. None of the information my friend was consuming was made available to me until I actively sought it out as a researcher.
  
  The most accessible metric of the impact of this campaigning is that in Kenya in 2017, over 100 people died in election-related violence. But there are intangible yet perceptible consequences, too. The political discourse in Kenya has shifted for the worse. Many voters were disenfranchised by the flawed election. Between the nullified August poll and the October rerun ordered by the Kenyan Supreme Court, voter turnout dropped from 79 percent to 38. Even from differing ideological silos, there is consensus that the turbulent campaign has left Kenya more unstable, and shown that true democracy is more elusive than we thought.
  
  Cambridge Analytica, of course, did not invent this type of political consulting. The lobbying and political-consultancy firm led by Paul Manafort, one of the Trump campaign’s key consultants, had served authoritarian regimes in Nigeria, Kenya, Zaire, Equatorial Guinea, and Somalia, among other places. Manafort and his associates were instrumental in rebranding Jonas Savimbi, the Angolan guerrilla leader, as an anti-communist fighter, securing US military aid for him, and essentially delaying an end to the brutal civil war in Angola.
  
  A 1992 report by the Center for Public Integrity estimated that Black, Manafort, Stone, and Kelly—the firm Manafort was part of—made $3.3 million from what the report described as “the torturers’ lobby.”
  
  The Intercept’s investigations into Erik Prince, former CEO of the now defunct Blackwater security empire, revealed his new firm’s involvement in the conflict in South Sudan, including an attempt to arm an agricultural plane in breach of international law. Last year, Bell Pottinger, the powerful London public-relations firm, shut down after it emerged that it had engineered a campaign to stoke racial tensions in South Africa to distract from queries over corruption in the Jacob Zuma administration. The firm only closed after South Africa’s opposition party lodged a complaint with the Public Relations and Communications Association, the organization that regulates the trade in the UK.
  
  
  Nanjala NyabolaTWITTERNanjala Nyabola is a writer and political analyst based in Nairobi, Kenya. She is the author of Digital Democracy, Analogue Politics (Zed Books, 2018), a forthcoming book on the impact of the internet on Kenyan politics.

In Kenya, Election Manipulation Is a Matter of Life and Death