Media influencers should a-spire to in-spire!

If you’re a tweep that’s resident anywhere in Uganda, it may have occurred to you by now that this week has been a holey one! And this has got nothing to do with the sumptuous rice party to which you were invited on Friday—marking the climax of the month of fasting for the Muslims—but, rather, the auspicious event that was the Kampala Pothole Exhibition. The Kampala dwellers together with their friends, relatives, in-laws, and well-wishers from neighboring cities like Jinja dedicated an entire 5-day period to pour out their souls and vent over the state of their roads. This, they did, by publishing as many graphic photos as they could of the menacing potholes. Whereas some of the images were accompanied with descriptive physical details such as depth, width and recommended angle of attack (for drivers), others were captioned with precise GPS coordinates to help you pin-point the exact location of the said hole on your Google Maps, so that you’ll hopefully avoid the road where it’s situated.

This campaign ran and will likely recur under the hashtag #KampalaPotholeExhibition. Browsing through the Twitter feed, it wouldn’t take long for your jaw to touch the floor as you shake your head in astonishment at the exquisite architectural designs and flawless finishing of the cavities, craters, pits and gullies; the occasional caves too! Such an engineering marvel, those holes! At one point I nearly questioned my sanity when my eyeballs landed on a terrifying photo of a mini grand canyon that had eaten into half the road! These, undoubtedly, are the skillful works of a dedicated team of world-class craftsmen at Kampala City Council Authority (KCCA).

How impeccable was the timing, though, that the official culmination of the exhibition should fall on a public hole-day! That said, this communal display of the amazing works of road art was the brainchild of Jimmy Spire Ssentongo. Mr. Spire is a man that needs cartoon introduction, as the millennials say—but quite literally too! Dr. Jimmy is a lecturer, author, famed editorial cartoonist and a whole catalogue of other things that are unlikely to fit here due to space constraints. But one thing that has stuck out prominently, at least in the past couple of days, is that he’s a man of great influence. What the civic activism bigwigs couldn’t do in years, he pulled off with a couple of tweets in a matter of a few days.

In a republic where any semblance of a street protest could earn you a swollen face at the merciless hands of an excited riot police force, Spire presumably thought it wise to mobilize a few thousand tweeps to demonstrate on the worldwide web. On Elon Musk’s cyber streets, the only way you’re gonna get red eyes will be from spending too much time on your phone scrolling up and down your Twitter feed, otherwise there’s zero chance you’ll be sniffing up on a dose of teargas. Except, of course, for the occasional toes you’ll step and the verbal threats you’ll receive from some arrogant fellow who, by the way, for me, evokes the memory of the American sitcom Everybody Hates Chris: if for any reason, just for the title! In this case, Honorable Chris—or Horrible Chris for that matter—threatens to effect your arrest for portraying the country negatively to the international community!

Speaking of which, it was in fact in the same week that the Tourism Board under the Explore Uganda brand concluded a media drive dubbed Explore West. The presumed purpose had been to draw to the attention of the domestic tourists–and the international, alike–the spectacular natural scenaries and local amenities that the western region has to offer to the adventurers. Even so, with all the on-going hullabaloo over missing iron sheets and whatnot, the tourism push may have been dead in the water before it even started.

The irony of the contrasting campaigns coming on the brink of running concurrently ensured an inconvenient and perhaps inadvertent clash of the two worlds. Talk about a spitting image of The Beauty and the Beast: the beauty of the West and the beastly roads that take you there! For all we know, this particular tourism drive fizzled like a party balloon as Spire’s #KampalaPotholeExhibition hashtag shot up to top the social media trends, and exploded like fireworks pretty much obscuring everything else including the iron sheets saga. From the savagery of their tweets, you didn’t need any convincing to notice that the city inhabitants had reached the end of their tether and nothing—especially not the beauty of the west—was gonna distract them from ranting!

The efficacy of this campaign is that in about two days, the story of it had picked up momentum and saturated the local media. By day three, it had spilled over to catch the prowling eyes of the international press. The responsible authority, KCCA, reached a point of complete inundation by the negative publicity: the sheer volume and brutality of the tweets may have almost prompted their PR department to crawl into some lidless roadside manhole to hide.

Thenceforth, it became clear that the only direction that the story of this crusade was going, was upward. On the fourth day, the sour-smelling stench of the pothole galleries had arisen high enough to reach the President’s nostrils. For the first time, he finally had a look at the craters he’s been presiding over for the past few decades. As to whether the dismal UGX 6bn (~USD1.6m) for the rehabilitation of the city roads would suffice to even scratch the surface of the problem, is a whole other matter. For now, the story is that in less than five days at the behest of one man, tables shook and tongues wagged enough to catch the attention of the Head of State.

With the benefit of hindsight, Dr. Spire has essentially altered the landscape of what we know as influencing. Additionally, he has re-calibrated the dynamics of a cyber protest and what result can be achieved from the same: where even you, as a little-known tweep, can exert influence and be an unwitting pawn in a bigger chess game that causes peaceful change. If a social media rally such as this can conjure the responsible individuals to wake from their slumber and take action, then it’s possible we’re on the cusp of mature demonstrations. The chaotic, disruptive and often fatal street protests may soon be a thing of history. That way, the ever-swelling teargas budgets could be trimmed significantly and the monies redirected to more important areas—like fixing the roads!

On the matter of influencing: over here, it appears that anybody with a couple of thousand followers will feel compelled to add the influencer label in their bio. While the label may be an accurate description for some, many are simply gossipers masquerading; you would cringe at the stuff they publish on their timelines. The most social impact they might have is if you unfortunately get sucked into the muddle of their gossip, or if a gig has dropped on their table and they’re finally posting some sensible content, whose scope of impression is even hardly, if at all, ground moving.

Our much-celebrated social media influencers have got the challenge of picking a leaf or two from the Professor; and aspire to inspire definitive, targeted positive changes in every sphere of influence in this country. Short of that, we’ll simply have a bunch of people who are famous for being famous

The difference between the typical Ugandan media influencer and a mover of Spire’s ilk is that, while his content has character; is defined and has a sense of direction, the others are usually just churning out noise. And, so, when they occasionally publish something that should be consequential, a few people ever take them seriously enough to consider rallying behind. This just might explain why even when the Tourism Board employed a number of the top socialites to promote the Explore West drive, it didn’t appear to take a lot for the less in-your-face cartoonist to single-handedly drum up support for his operation and quickly overshadow the former.

Retrospectively, even though he might be in a different weight class altogether, our much-celebrated social media influencers have got the challenge of picking a leaf or two from the Professor; and aspire to inspire definitive, targeted positive changes in every sphere of influence in this country. Short of that, we’ll simply have a bunch of people who are famous for being famous, and nothing more. Moving forward, the Tourism board will probably want to re-consider whom they dish the next exploration gig!

With the dust barely settled on the potholes campaign, there’s apparently another upcoming, and the focus will be the health sector. Look out for the Twitter hashtag #UgandaHealthExhibition. This one will potentially highlight the tragedy of our ailing healthcare system and why many high-profile citizens seem to prefer spending their final days on earth under the care of doctors in medical facilities outside the country, only to return as regular cargo. This sad trend has never been a good image to leave on our minds, but, unfortunately, this happens all the time.