#DumsorMustStop: The tweet heard around the world [infographics]
Tonight more than a thousand Ghanaians raised their voices (and their placards and torch lights) in Accra to demand decisive action on the dumsor power crisis. As TV host Sokoo Hemaa told the Daily Graphic in an exclusive discussion during the demonstrations, "all it took was one tweet" to spark the movement. That historic tweet was made on May 4, by the movie star, model, producer, and entrepreneur Ms. Yvonne Nelson.
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Within minutes of that tweet, the #DumsorMustStop hashtag was picked up by Yvonne's 471,000 followers on Twitter. Over the next two weeks, the hashtag spread across Ghana and the global diaspora, showing the world that you can make a snowball in West Africa:
In all, the hashtag has reached an audience of nearly 3.2 million Twitter users so far.
The day Ms. Nelson sent her tweet, #DumsorMustStop posts jumped to 300 per day, with another big spike during tonight's vigil. A report on May 11th that nurses at Kaneshie polyclinic are delivering newborns by torchlight also caused an uptick in tweets with the hashtag.
Without attempting to subtract from the relevance or significance of the #DumsorMustStop movement, it's important to remember that 300 tweets per day is modest for a country of 3.2 million internet users—professional wrestler Kofi Kingston alone has 1.5 million Twitter followers. Moreover, before there was #DumsorMustStop, there was #Dumsor. The Twi expression has now passed into common use around Ghana for several years now, becoming synonymous with not just with the blackouts, but all manner of dysfunction. Just ask Mr. Dumsor, himself. Ghanaians have produced roughly 2,000 tweets per day in May to discuss dumsor, including the rally.
At tonight's protests, everybody was pushing and shoving to catch a glimpse of Ms. Nelson, Van Vicker and D-Black (you needed an extra-long neck to see Sarkodie, though). Their celebrity may have galvanized mass action, but let's take a moment to recognize the Twitter soldiers who made the #DumsorMustStop hashtag a global phenomenon:
And speaking of the unsung, let's thank the very first person to adopt the hashtag #DumsorMustStop, back on February 20, @Usherbeatz, who didn't get a single re-tweet for his efforts.
Of course, at the end of the day (which is when the lights go out in millions of homes across Ghana), the struggle to end dumsor isn't about any single person.
