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businessdailyafrica.com/economy/Wester… The same Western diplomats who rushed to endorse a rubbish election today warn us about the dangers of "fake news".
Interesting. They don't consider what they, their governments and observers were doing in the days after August 8 as spreading "fake news"?
Fake news is nothing new. Kenyans have long been used to receiving disinformation, mostly in the form of #OfficialTruth from GoK
Remember #Westgate and #JKIAfire and #AlShabulb? Remember KBC in the 90s using old footage of Nairobi to "prove" protests weren't happening?
.@BobGodec & Co. seem to forget that #FakeNews and #OfficialTruth are two sides of the same coin. KE media is also making the same mistake.
.@BD_Africa cites @Abbas_Gullet on Mathare. Yet ignores that on the same day, @KTNNews interviewed residents who confirmed attacks. 
The idea is that #OfficialTruth trumps citizens' lived reality. "Now Kenyans, are you going to believe what you see, or what I tell you?"
It is the same when it comes to the election itself. Despite everything we saw, it was not stolen until #SCOK said it was.
This idea of the state and its agencies as the determinants of truth, this privileging of officialdom and its declarations, is disturbing.
It flies in the face of our lived experience. Throughout KE history, GoK and its colonial forebears have not been particularly truthful.
The KE state was conceived in deception and that's its default setting. Think of that next time someone says you wait for #OfficialTruth.
Even when the state speaks of of transparency and truth-telling, it is almost always with the intention of subverting them. Remember this?
Queue voting was Mo1's idea of electoral transparency. Remember this when Jubilee urges a return to 2007-style manual results transmission.
Manual RTS is what gave us PEV, the Kriegler commission and electronic RTS. Reverting to manual therefore would simply be repeating history.
So once again we see the state taking advantage of the rhetoric of transparency to actually subvert openness and scrutiny. #OfficialTruth
