Are Kenyans allowing their private communications to be monitored?

Protection of individual rights and liberties has been on both the African continental agenda and the global agenda for decades.

Attitudes, experiences,and perceptions have changed over the past decade.

The Afrobarometer report uncovered that citizens generally recognise that civic and political space is indeed closing as governments’ supply of freedom to citizens decreases.

The results also showed a decline in popular demand for freedom.

The report conducted in 34 countries between late 2016 and late 2018, comes in the wake of the Huduma Namba debate and questions on whether Kenyans' private information is too exposed.

Afrobarometer conducts face-to-face interviews in the language of the respondent’s choice with nationally representative samples that yield country-level results with margins of error of +/-2 to +/-3 percentage points at a 95% confidence level.

It said a significant number of Africans are willing to allow their private communications to be monitored.

The High Court has cleared the biometric registration of Kenyans by the Government, but with limitations to the scope of personal details that can be accessed.

The Afrobarometer report further finds considerable willingness among citizens to accept government imposition of restrictions on individual freedoms in the name of protecting public security.

In a context where violent extremists are perpetrating attacks in a growing number of countries, the public may acquiesce to governments’ increasing circumscription of individual rights and collective freedoms.

Fear of insecurity, instability, and/or violence may be leading citizens of at least some African countries to conclude that freedoms come with costs as well as benefits, and that there may be such a thing as too much freedom, the report says.

On April 25, Parliament recommended the blacklisting of a company involved in Huduma Namba registration.

The House voted to bar Idemia (formerly OT Morpho) from conducting business in the country for its alleged role in procurement malpractices in the last General Election.

The government had said it would switch off mobile phone sim cards whose owners will not have registered for Huduma Namba by the end of the deadline. It later denied the claims.

The Communications Authority Director General Francis Wangusi had earlier put Kenyans on notice over the importance of the National Integrated  Management Systems (NIIMS), saying there would be consequences.

Some 43% of those surveyed in the Afrobarometer report are willing to accept government monitoring in the interests of security.

Some 75% of those surveyed in Mali agreed with the statement that the government should be able to monitor private communications, for example on mobile phones, to make sure that people are not plotting violence.

The research suggests that "violent extremists... may be taking a toll on popular commitment to individual liberties and civil rights".

The report concludes that troubling continental trends point toward both greater government constraints on freedom and greater public tolerance for these constraints.

"Perhaps the current emphasis on the UN Sustainable Development Goals can be used by human-rights advocates to push back against creeping infringements and once again make the protection of basic freedoms a cornerstone of Africa’s more liberal political systems."