Hoping for better times can kill you, but often it is the only thing keeping you alive

Many journalists in godforsaken places have their own version of what is essentially the same script of heartbreak. You have a story; an exposé of criminality or some other wrongdoing. The facts check out. The evidence is solid. It is all in the public interest. Even the old grizzly editors, usually reticent and risk-averse, are raring to go.

The lightning of publication is followed by the growling thunder of reaction. Denials are issued, in tandem with statements of clarification. Vituperative threats to sue, hiding their vacuity in the flower vases of empty verse, pour through the mailboxes.

A friendly civil society group, stirred from the boredom of impact assessments, calls a press conference at which strong demands for this explanation or that accountability are made. Photographs are carefully curated for inclusion in the annual report.

Officials from one or more statutory accountability bodies may also find time, between their workshop sessions and mouthfuls of beef samosas, to announce that they will investigate the claims to their logical conclusions. 
The police might even appear and make a gesture or comment about how long the arm of the law is.

This breathless anticipation lasts a few days before it is covered in the blue blistering barnacles of banality, covered up by the thundering typhoon of the next big story. Investigations start but never end. Committees of inquiry turn into navel-gazing theatres of the absurd. The long arm of the law resumes its methodical rifling through suspects’ pockets.

Nothing comes of the exposé. The world, unceasing in its spinning and turning in the rest of the galaxy, moves on. The supernova of possibility is sucked by the gravity of impunity into a black hole of impotence.
This – or something similar – must be what the folks behind recent social media exhibitions demanding public accountability must be feeling. It is a bitter-sweet feeling of achieving yet longing; winning yet losing; of running a long and exhausting marathon that brings you back to the start. It feels like a dark board game in which all the ladders have been removed: who wants to play Snakes and Adders?

This stuff can be depressing. It can fuel self-destructive (or just distractive) behaviour that leads people to cross metaphorical roads without looking both ways. Even when they are pushed into on-rushing traffic it is easy to explain it all away as a tragicomedy of an accident that was always waiting to happen.

It need neither be binary nor a zero-sum equation. For perspective, let’s consider the power and shortcomings of these social media campaigns. The secret sauce is the ability to crowd-source supplementary information or context allowing a tiny kernel planted into fertile soil to quickly germinate into a tree of information.
This allows a fuller picture to be built more rapidly, unlocks the agency and participation of ordinary folk, and shifts them from consumers to producers and curators of information. Citizens used to waiting for others, including journalists, to spoon-feed them can become co-creators and fact-checkers.

The rapid nature of this discovery and storytelling can be giddy and create a tantalising sense of immediacy. It is also the rocky shoreline on which the boats carrying dreams often flounder.
See, change sometimes can come quickly. A hashtag trending today can lead to a statue being pulled down tomorrow, or an unpopular policy being reversed. Mostly, however, change is glacial.

Things can go badly wrong very fast but progressive and positive change often takes consistent effort by many people over many years. Think of the slave trade, the anti-colonial struggles, or the civil rights movement. These and similar landmark causes did not happen overnight; they took many people doing many small things until it all snowballed into tipping points – like a solitary Black woman refusing to give up her seat on the bus – that toppled entrenched power structures.
Campaigning for transparent and accountable government may not have the same gravitas as ending the slave trade or feudalism but the underlying dynamic of resistance from those who benefit from the status quo remains the same.

Understanding that change takes time and that it often claims many of yesterday’s heroes and heroines, is essential to staying sane and staying the course. This is a hard ask in a culture of constant scrolling, one-click shopping and instant gratification but the laws of nature cannot be forced.
Many years ago when your columnist hands-on edited this newspaper, this frustration almost got the better of me. A comment from a Western diplomat helped it make sense. “When you see a minister in my country resigning because he used taxpayer’s money to buy a five-pound sandwich,” he said, “remember that there have been hundreds of years since the Magna Carta, in which we have been trying to take our power back. All that matters is that you make a small contribution.”

This was in 2009. The Magna Carta, which laid down the principle that the king of England and his government were not above the law, was issued in 1215. Hope can kill you, but sometimes it is the only thing keeping you alive.ic development of our country.

Mr Kalinaki is a journalist and  poor man’s freedom fighter. 
[email protected]; @Kalinaki