From Finance Bills to Corruption Scandals: How Social Media, ChatGPT Tools Redefine Civic Education in Kenya

From Finance Bills to Corruption Scandals: How Social Media, ChatGPT Tools Redefine Civic Education in Kenya

Early last month, as Kenyans grew increasingly angry over the increased taxation introduced by the Finance Bill 2024 at the onset of the 2024/25 financial year, social media became a public forum.

Traditionally, Kenyans have been among the top social media users on the continent. Data from Statista shows that Kenyan online users spent an average of 3.32 hours daily on social networking sites in 2023, just minutes behind Nigerians and South Africans.

This trend has been amplified by youth aged below 28, commonly referred to as Generation Z (Gen Z), who have driven social media’s prominence as a platform for civic engagement, especially on X and TikTok.

Hashtags and Online Protests

On X, Kenyans used hashtags to drive conversations, shared links to resources, and resurfaced old media articles to explain concepts. This platform also saw youth organizing protests before showing up offline in large numbers in towns and cities across Kenya.

However, explaining the often bulky and jargon-laden government documents, such as the measures proposed by President William Ruto’s government to raise Ksh.346 billion more in revenue, posed a challenge.

On TikTok, youth translated the contentious Bill into local languages to ensure non-English and Swahili-speaking Kenyans understood the government’s plans.

Surprisingly, the popular AI chatbot ChatGPT, made by American AI company OpenAI, entered the scene. On June 13, the first Kenyan-made custom GPT tool, ‘Finance Bill GPT,’ was announced to help Kenyans better understand the now-scrapped draft law.

Created by software engineer Kelvin Onkundi, it operated similarly to OpenAI’s ChatGPT by taking questions and generating text-based responses. Onkundi trained the GPT tool with the Finance Bill itself and some articles from journalists.

New AI Tools for Legal Guidance

A week later, another Kenyan software engineer, Sospeter Mong’are, introduced the ICT Authority Bill 2024 GPT to provide insights on the Information and Communications Technology Authority Bill, 2024.

Soon after, Onkundi announced ‘Kenya Law Guide,’ trained on various elements of the Constitution.

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This chatbot explained queries about several legal documents, including the Finance Bill, 2024, the Traffic Act, the Land Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2023, and the Penal Code.

Another Kenyan, Marion Kavengi, created ‘SHIF GPT’ to provide a breakdown of the Social Health Insurance Fund (SHIF), replacing the National Health Insurance Fund (NHIF), detailing patients’ benefits under different tariffs.

Political and Anti-Corruption Tools

On June 26, President Ruto announced he would not sign the Finance Bill, 2024 into law after public pressure and deadly protests.

However, the demonstrations evolved into resistance against Ruto’s administration over public resource wastage, corruption, and a failure to listen to Kenyans. Amidst this, another GPT tool, ‘Corrupt Politicians GPT,’ was unveiled by X user @BenwithSon.

This tool provided information about past corruption scandals involving politicians and government officials, generating a chronological list of scandals linked to any Kenyan political figure, including details and outcomes of the cases.

ChatGPT, built on OpenAI’s generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) models, is refined for conversational applications and was released by Microsoft-backed OpenAI in November 2022.

It has been credited with stimulating the AI boom, leading to the development of AI tools that generate almost real-looking images, speech synthesizers, and text-to-video models.

OpenAI’s latest GPT foundation model, GPT-4, was released on March 14, 2023, with a text-to-video generation model, Sora, under development.

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Despite President Ruto dropping the contentious draft bill and pledging austerity, many Kenyans continue to call for his resignation, chanting “Ruto must go” and organizing ongoing protests.

The developers of these GPT tools see them as a way to make civic education more accessible and hold the government accountable. Onkundi emphasized the need to make information, Bills, and Acts of Parliament accessible to everyone.

From Finance Bills to Corruption Scandals: How Social Media, ChatGPT Tools Redefine Civic Education in Kenya

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