*Posted by Tim on behalf of David Lidington MP*
In the last ten days, blogs like Kenyan Pundit (Hat-tip to Iain Dale for alerting me to this one), bankelele and Insight Kenya have been part of my daily reading. With Kenya's conventional broadcasters either under government pressure or exercising self-censorship, it was the blogs that told me what was going on. They were usually a day or two ahead of international media reports in reporting both on the violence and growing humanitarian crisis and on the twists and turns of political events.
It was clear from the posts I read that Kenyans themselves were relying on the internet and cell phones to find out what was going on in their own country: whether a relative was safe or what their political leaders were thinking. Ordinary Kenyans are now trying to put together an accurate record of the violence and killings, using the net to collate on one site reports from local NGOs and individuals.
The Kenyan voices on blogs and other web sites expressed a mix of feelings: anger at election fraud, revulsion at the killings, fear at what ethnic, political and economic division meant for the future, belief that it was Kenyans themselves and not outsiders who had to take responsibility for finding a solution. These are Africans who believe in democracy, who want an end to corruption, and who assert their right as citizens to criticise their rulers. Of course online access is for now mostly a privilege of the minority who are well-off and well-educated and I can't pretend that this is more than anecdotal evidence of Kenyan opinion. But amid the horror of last week I found there some reason for hope for the future.
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