Want to effect real change? Then take the fight off Twitter

Living in China certainly has its perks. Your senses are constantly assailed with your sights and sounds, while your palate revels in new flavors. Yes I’ve tasted frog and no, I haven’t eaten dog. Yet. Unfortunately, for a social media-phile and blogger like me, the inability to use social media like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Wordpress, because they are banned is extremely frustrating. The ‘Great Firewall of China’ is keeping me from tapping into the great resource that is social media. I honestly feel lost sometimes because I don’t know what is going on and what people are talking about. Thankfully, there are few ways to bypass this firewall although it’s often tedious and often unsuccessful. Last week was one of those times when I was able to get online and guess what the ‘topic’ of the day was? Maternity leave. Or rather, insufficient amount of it. There is a group of young, Rwandan Twitter fanatics that I jokingly call the ‘Twitter mafia’. When they have an issue that strays a bit too close to home, they make such a ruckus online that if online outrage was a currency, they would all become multimillionaires. I won’t lie. Sometimes even I join the mob. They’ve complained about nightclub closures, Halloween parties and Kigali City Council ordinances. Last week, maternity leave was what got their goat. They ranted, they raved and screamed bloody murder at the specter of women being forced to leave their newborns at home only six weeks after giving birth. Which is okay. What I take issue with is the fact that they became interested in what was going on only after the Labour Law (which contained the controversial article) was signed into law. What is disappointing is that when the draft law was in parliament, the people making the most noise didn’t say a word. They cannot plead ignorance. This very newspaper wrote countless articles about the deliberations and I’m sure it wasn’t the only one. The information was out there. But as I wrote in April this year, when complaining about the public disinterest on the issue, “when the Parliament passed the new labour code that, among other things, reduced the paid maternity leave from three months to only six weeks, I didn’t see any women’s group protest and make a ruckus. I didn’t see anyone pen scathing articles and blogs, despite the fact that they could....Never mind the fact that I don’t know how in the world a new mother will be expected to leave her breastfeeding child at home and go to work; perhaps the house-help will feed the baby?” Only after the law was passed, signed and gazetted did people speak out. And folks, once something is in the national gazette, its law. There is no coming back from that. However, imagine if all this Twitter activity had started all those months back? What if that ‘mafia’ had sunk its teeth in the maternity leave clause while it was still being debated? Perhaps nothing would have changed. But perhaps it would have. We sadly won’t be able to know either way now. Honestly speaking, I have some issues with those who use Twitter in lieu of ‘real’ activism to get their points across. In my opinion, while Twitter and other forms of social media are a great tool to increase and disseminate knowledge, they cannot stand in for real boots on the ground. There must be an analog (read physical element) to a digital complaint. I get frustrated with people who spend their entire afternoons self-indulgently composing tweets while things go belly up. Where is the organisation? Where are the placards? Where are the Letters to the Editor? Where are the online petitions? Who are the ones calling their parliamentary representatives? When one looks at the way protest and advocacy groups have operated over the years, they’ve been organised. But when I look around, I don’t see any organisations that speak on behalf of young, professional Rwandans. A friend of mine claimed that the maternity law was passed the way it was simply because there weren’t any child-bearing female MP’s. I do not have any evidence of that. I think it’s time we stopped agonising and started organising.The writer is a New Times editor currently pursuing a post-graduate degree @sannykigali

Opinions

Want to effect real change? Then take the fight off Twitter