Well now, social media – this same Facebook that you’re now using – may be the most powerful political tool on earth. Kenya President Uhuru Kenyatta has even bettered Trump tweets by unfollowing his Deputy President.
Kenya is agog. First of all, you do know what “unfollow” means don’t you?
It’s worse than being fired. It’s worse than losing a national election. It’s worse than a divorce, according to some, or maybe even worse than your dog not coming to you when you call it.
It’s ultimate, violence-free ostracism.
It’s so bad that the vast majority of the unfollowed don’t know it. Most of them still think they’re popular. They still tweet and post and blog thinking that thousands are admiring them when, in fact, they’re posting into the black hole of the unfollowed.
You usually don’t even know that you’ve been unfollowed. In fact you’ve undoubtedly already been unfollowed many times. Facebook and Twitter won’t advise you that you’ve been unfollowed. In Facebook you still show up as their “friend.”
I’m not talking about “defriending.” Nobody does that. “Unfollow” lets you defriend without defriending because nobody knows.
Aha, unless you’re a national personality and everyone is following your every move, including geeks who know how to determine all the switches and clicks that you’re doing on Twitter and Facebook for instance. Then the ruse is up.
But if you’re a public person with a decent IT staff, they’ve topped your Top Security briefing with the world’s best tool for putting the ultimate pox on someone you can’t stand who at least until now you’ve had to pretend to be friends with: The Unfollow.
Moreover, it’s clear that if you’re a public person that you probably know someone is going to know and so you probably want that person and the world to know what you did.
The President of Kenya unfollowed the vice president of Kenya.
The relationship was never close. Not too many elections ago, the two were vicious opponents. Not too long before that the men’s two different tribes spent much of their time killing one another.
The president’s brilliant move an election ago to make an alliance with the man who had been his arch enemy, by bringing him onto the ticket as his vice president (“Deputy President” in Kenyan jargon) secured Kenyatta his victory. The two tribes just broke the threshold of majority voters.
It wasn’t exactly a “Team of Rivals” because the “team” was just one man and came before not after the election victory. After the election the vice president was immediately marginalized.
But he kept up a powerful profile and as with country presidents and vice presidents nearly everywhere, the vice president is often considered in line to be president.
That was the deal, William Ruto said. He’d hang in the background like all vice presidents do, waiting out the term limit trigger that would then propel him into power.
Sorry. He’s been unfollowed. Besides the way so-called “democracies” are going, term limits for the chief of state might be an aging concept.
So what did he do when he was unfollowed? Did he unfollow the President? No, instead he joined a growing community of Kenyan politicians who are apologizing – on Facebook – for having said anything bad about anyone else during the last election.
It’s a national mea culpa and the country is responding very favorably – if you rank their opinion by the comments on Facebook.
One day, two days, four days after being unfollowed by Uhuru Kenyatta, William Ruto has still not unfollowed Uhuru.
But the act is done. Had it been a mistake, or a presumptive move by an underling, it would have been reversed by now. It hasn’t. You cannot distance yourself from someone any further than the infinity of shame represented by an “unfollowing.”
Ruto is toast. Cold, British toast. Not even Marmite will help.
He will never be president. Facebook guarantees it.