Crime risk as message app used by chiefs is shut down

Lanet Umoja Chief Francis Kariuki during an interview at Standard Group office in Nakuru yesterday. [ Kipsang Joseph, Standard]

In 2013, the chief of Nakuru's Lanet Umoja was invited to Silicon Valley in San Francisco to give a talk on his transformative way of using Twitter as a crime-fighting tool.

Chief Francis Kariuki was lauded both locally and abroad for the way he took advantage of a service provided by social media to share tweets to hundreds of people via text message.

He was known for communicating to residents in his location using Twitter by sending tweets which are then delivered to those who had subscribed to his tweets through a free text messaging service.

The ingenuity of the service is that you do not need to have a Twitter account or an internet connection to get alerts from the chief.

Signed up

And because of that, residents signed up in their hundreds so that they could be informed of the goings-on in the area.

One day it would be a fire at a neighbour’s house that needed a quick response, the next a missing sheep or robbers who had broken into a home.

Once a crime is detected and the chief is informed, he sends an alert through his phone and help is immediately arrives as neighbours mobilise one another to respond to the emergency.

So successful was Mr Kariuki's method that he was asked by the Government to give lectures on the service and to train other chiefs in the art of using social media for community policing. And by 2015, the service had been replicated across the country.

Some of the tweets update on Chief Francis Kariuki's hand gear. [Kipsang Joseph, Standard]

Each of the 47 counties has one chief who tweets and the areas that have a tweeting chief have been found to be safer than the other without.

But the gains made by Kariuki and his colleagues stand to be reversed after mobile service providers suspended the service a couple of weeks ago.

The development will put a dent in efforts made to secure neighbourhoods in rural areas where residents rely on communication from the chief.

Apart from security matters, the app was also being used by religious leaders to evangelise.

So effective was the service that by the click of a button, clerics would interact with their flock from faraway places in real time.

Catholic priest Joseph Kaniu, for example, is based in Paris, France, but has been sharing scripture versus with his congregation in Kenya through the service.

"We are very disappointed by the abrupt interruption of the service. It was a very effective tool in our work since we deal with people in rural areas, some of whom have no smartphones but would be able to receive the service," Fr Kaniu told The Standard.

He pleaded with the service providers to restore the service "as part of corporate social responsibility since it was serving the masses."

Kaniu's sentiments are shared by his colleague, Joseph Ngure, who lamented that the disruption of the service was a blow to evangelical work.

"This is a service like no other as even people with phones without internet were able to get messages. We hope this is a temporary move and the companies will resume the service," said Fr Ngure.

According to Kariuki and other chiefs who had got used to the service, crime was slowly creeping back into their localities and they were powerless to mobilise for action.

“We used to depend on. It was the most effective method of communication and the withdrawal of the service has left us without an alternative.

“We have now turned to word of mouth and calling people individually in case there are incidents, which is slow and cumbersome,” said Kariuki, who has earned the moniker ‘tweeting chief’.

He is in the same predicament as Nyeri's Kiamwathi chief Charles Wangai.

“People were used to the service. They would get the alerts even on ‘mulika mwizi’ (phone without apps) wherever they were,” he said.

The chiefs said that although there are other ways of sending mass messages such as WhatsApp, this would be a challenge for rural audiences.

Wangai said not everyone had a smartphone, and not all those who do can afford data bundles.

Some, he said, have never seen the Twitter app and only know that tweets come to their phones. Unlike Twitter where an important message can be lost in the clutter of the timeline, a message was delivered in the other service.

“The other one was just an ordinary SMS that could go to all types of phones at no cost,” he said.

According to the administrators, the service was able to save lives and foil robberies.

“What was happening before the service was terminated was that if someone was tampering with another's property, I would be informed and would post it on Twitter and the notification would go to people in real time. The public would be able to step in and salvage the situation,” Kariuki said.

A week ago, he explained, one of the residents of his locality was attacked but due to the slow response, he was hijacked and later abandoned at Kiratina trading centre.

“It is devastating because wananchi call me everyday asking what happened to Twitter,” he said.

Chief's appeal

The chief said he had taken up the matter with Twitter and was informed that the company was in communication with Safaricom on the issue.

Safaricom confirmed that it had pulled the plug on the service. The acting consumer business director, Charles Kare, said the five-year partnership on the service between Safaricom and Twitter had lapsed.

"We entered into a partnership with Twitter five years ago, when the uptake of mobile applications and smartphones was still in its infancy. Having run through its course, the partnership recently lapsed."

However, he said both parties were keen to extend the partnership.

"We are currently discussing with our partner how to take this to the next level by evaluating areas of improvement, bearing in mind the technology developments since this service started and looking into ways to add value to our customers through a wide array of products and services,” said Mr Kare.

This is not the first time that the service had been cancelled. It was halted in 2008 but was later restored.

The service is still active in other countries in Africa.