#Hashtivists using Twitter, Facebook to abuse women rights

Most valuable readers, today, I will seek you indulgence to address an issue that is very close to my heart, and other body organs. Many of you might not agree with me that there is a new character in Kenya’s virtual world that has changed the way Kenyans relate in the real world.

It has transformed the way they conduct their businesses and how they compliment and accuse one another for their real or imagined achievements and infractions.

The particular virtual character has created a new profession and given many people several opportunities to become relevant in a country where respect exists only in the dictionary and where statutory institutions stand on shaky foundations of impunity.

It is not easy to tell whether this virtual character, the #hashtag it is, will prevent Kenya from achieving the Vision 2030 or propel it past other countries in defending the rights of the boy child and women-folk. But it is currently painting the Kenyan woman in poor light, hurting her image and giving her a bad name even as it changes the way activists operate, or, well, activate.

Fickle minded

The hashtag, as many Kenyans do not know it, is a tool that is increasingly being used as a weapon not to promote, but to demean, denigrate, insult, disparage and belittle the long-suffering Kenyan women whose cries are the butt of all jokes in comical segments of television news and are used as mobile phone ringtones.

The character has not only created a new breed of activists, the hashtag activists, or hashtivists, but is also encouraging misogyny and working against women — exactly the opposite of what Kenya’s women’s rights hashtivists think they will achieve.

Insult to feminism

Just a sec! I have never pronounced that M word in my writing life. I have never even written it, and this is the first time it is appearing in this column which is in its tenth year.

However, some weeks back, I chanced upon a statement on new media platform proclaiming that “Clay Muganda made a career out of writing misogynistic articles about women.” Even the grammar in that statement is wrong, but I did not label it cyber-bullying, which is Kenya’s newest lifestyle illness afflicting journalists who thrive on hurling barbs but are fickle minded enough to whine about being cyber-bullied when their arsenal boomerang.

A few days earlier, I had received another compliment when I was told I “should not use a small boy to pick fights with women, but should choose my battles like a man.”

Ironically, I have never met the new media users who showered me with those praises, and I was wondering what good deed I had performed to deserve such paeans.

In the first instance, I had asked, on Twitter no less, why there was no outrage over a news report that a three-year-old boy, somewhere in Baringo, had been sexually molested by his grandmother and his hysterical, helpless mother was crying out for justice.

In the second instance, I had asked a certain new media user why he/she tweeted that a certain Kenyan media house was full of sexual assaulters, yet he/she had no proof.

Chuffed as I was with all the attention I was getting, I managed to keep my cool but I was sure the Clay Muganda stock had risen in the Share Index of Kenyan Twitterverse, that new jurisdiction where people are tried and sentenced by hashtivists without being heard.

The hashtag has created a new type of women’s rights activists, and lowered the fight for women’s rights to the level of politics, the profession for which the prerequisite is ignorance of any foregoing issues and for which no experience is required.

Some would argue that these are feminists, but calling them feminists would be an insult both to feminism and Kenya’s real feminists who understand women’s issues and have been at the forefront in celebrating their achievements, defending their rights and pointing out their infractions.

At most, they are rabble rousers without causes, and courses too; directionless men and women who think with their fingers and lack the mental capacity to talk against injustices meted out to, and hardships faced by underprivileged women residing in villages and informal settlements and working in backstreets, bylanes and farmlands.

Their so-called fights for rights are triggered by non-issues, fuelled by ignorance and are skewed because there is a certain type of a Kenyan woman, the economically affluent, whose rights is always being violated.

According to them, the woman in a Kenyan village, the one who does not know how bottled water tastes, the one who thinks Kenya is just a wealthy neighbouring country, the woman who does not know where her next meal is coming from, does not have any rights worth defending or fighting for.

The hashtivists pick low-hanging fruits, yeah, battles between the wealthy and the known, petty issues that are halfway won or solved, and they wail over imagined sufferance, but still castigate women achievers who make it without paying obeisance to them.

The woman who can talk with her fingers, the one who can report — on new media platforms of course — how she fights for women’s rights by telling off a man who crosses her path to go and beat up his wife instead, the one who gets depressed when told she has added weight, is the woman whose rights are worth fighting for.

Annoying creature

But that woman whose son has been defiled has no rights and anybody who asks where the outrage is can only be looking for a fight with women — the type and kind and ilk of the hashtivist whose rights are violated just because the tip of her acrylic nail broke while she was boarding a passenger service vehicle.

 

Yeah, that kind of Kenyan women who go on new media platforms to whine about how their rights are being violated since there are no free umbrellas at street corners which they can use during the rainy season to protect their hair and eyelashes and probably their armpits and other Brazilian waxed body parts.

Being a women’s rights activist has never been simple! For people to become women’s rights activists in Kenya today, all they need are keyboards and dustbins to dump their brains for the duration they will be involved in hashtivism.

The new set of women’s rights activists are the worst thing that happened to Kenya since the country started getting divided and polarised along ethnic and economic lines.

The hashtivists are the living proof that everything is wrong with Kenya’s education system, and that its moral fabric is torn, tattered, and so archaic it should be discarded and replaced with one even from countries whose economies have not been rebased.

There is no annoying creature in Kenya today than the women’s rights hashtivists who cannot internalise the Kenyan woman’s problems.

They totally do not understand that their hashtivism is reducing women’s problems to the least basic and inconsequential, so much so that it is lowering their integrity.

Kenya’s women’s rights hashtivists are just rolling back the little gains Kenyan women have made over the years and portraying them as a people who are divided along several lines and know not their issues.

The non-focused hashtivism is not just denigrating Kenyan women, but taking them back to the days when everyone knew about their existence, but cared less about their rights and all their needs.