President Ruto Engages Kenyans On X

Kenya’s President William Ruto engaged with over 1.8 million citizens who tuned in to X Space on Friday to discuss some of the issues raised by young demonstrators opposed to the now-rejected Finance Bill 2024.

X Space is a feature within the social media platform X that allows users to host and join live audio conversations. Introduced in late 2020, Twitter Spaces enables users to create public or private audio chat rooms to discuss various topics in real-time.

The session, scheduled to run from 2 pm to 5 pm, started late owing to technical hitches. Three attempts to connect with Kenyans failed.

The fourth time was the charm, hosted by Sir-Rap-A-Lot aka @Osama_otero, immediately attracting over 100k users who joined the Space to follow or contribute to the discussions despite some scheduled parallel Spaces. During the session, President Ruto responded directly to some of the issues raised by the listeners including police harassment, inhumane demolitions, corruption, his leadership style and extra-judicial killings et al.

Digitally Savvy Protesters

The digitally savvy protesters, largely made up of Gen Z and Millennials, leveraged digital spaces to plan and garner support against the Finance Bill. They used X Space, TikTok, Facebook, and other platforms to organise, update demonstrators, and document street action.

Since its introduction in 2020, X Space has become an attractive platform for casual users, celebrities, organizations, politicians and governments to connect and engage with their audiences meaningfully. The biggest X Space was hosted by serial entrepreneur Mario Nawfal featuring Elon Musk, Andrew Tate, Alex Jones, and others in 2023. It had over 15 million total listeners and more than 118k live viewers.