The Things That Build Democracy Don't Tend to Be So Democratic

The Founding Fathers of America — the people who designed the architecture of the most celebrated democracy in history — did not build it democratically. The things that build democracy don't tend to be so democratic. That is a sentence I keep returning to, because it reframes a question that most people in the West take as settled: is now the right time for Africa to be a very big proponent of keeping the democratic infrastructure running?

I want to be precise about what I am asking. I am not arguing against accountability, or human rights, or the right of citizens to contest election results. I am asking a sequencing question. If a nation is poor — if it cannot fund its own budget — does it make sense to keep pouring resources into elections while the foundations that would make those elections meaningful remain unbuilt? Can you build the infrastructure that democracy needs to flourish while democracy already exists in its current form, consuming time and money and attention that could go to roads, electricity, hospitals, and productive capacity?

These are the questions I continue to battle with. And they surfaced, unexpectedly, from a conversation about a messaging app.

The Tool That Started the Question

I was recently interviewed by Uma Kagenaar, a Dutch journalist studying crisis and conflict journalism at City St George University in London, about Bitchat — a decentralized messaging platform that uses Bluetooth mesh networking to transmit encrypted messages without the Internet. She wanted to understand what happened when Uganda's government shut down the Internet during the last election cycle.

What happened was this: for about five days to a week, the Internet was made unreliable or entirely unavailable. There has been a precedent of election-stage management in Uganda where services are turned on or rendered inefficient, and among them the most common target has been the Internet. Previously, the shutdown lasted only election day. This time, it stretched much longer.

Bitchat had already existed. I had an account before the election hype. My friend and I were in the same house when it launched — we turned on our Bluetooth, turned off our data, and it worked. During the election period, Bitchat saw over a million downloads in a country of 48 million. The opposition embraced it and added it to their mobilization strategy. It spread heavily on TikTok.

But here is the honest part: I did not personally use Bitchat during the shutdown to relay election information. I would be lying if I said I did. I tested it with friends earlier. It worked at 300 to 400 metres — enough to message someone on the next block, to ask if they were coming for a run. For longer distances, you need density: enough active users between sender and receiver for the message to hop through. With a million downloads spread across 48 million people, that density was not there for nationwide communication.

Uganda was not the best test case because the shutdown was relatively short. The real proof will come when a government keeps the Internet off for two or three months — long enough for even the older generation to learn the technology. And that is a terrible thing to wish for, because it means prolonged unrest. But that is the reality of how these tools prove themselves.

What Actually Breaks When the Internet Dies

Uma kept asking me to describe what an Internet shutdown feels like. People who have never experienced one think of it as losing social media. The reality is that every layer of modern society collapses simultaneously.

Hospitals rely on Internet infrastructure for appointments, insurance verification, and organ transfer coordination. If I had gotten sick during the shutdown, I could not have presented my insurance card and received treatment, because the insurance system talking to the hospital system runs entirely online. There were rumours that health facilities kept some connectivity, but it was shaky and unreliable. In extreme cases, people died.

A friend of mine runs a business. His suppliers needed payment. He could not make digital transfers. The supplier felt let down; my friend could not fulfil his obligation. This was one entrepreneur among thousands. You could pay into a mobile money line, but you could not withdraw. The bankers were given a holiday. ATMs were limited. The squeeze was not just communication — they limited everything tied to what the government categorized as potential election violence.

Families with relatives abroad went days without contact. International transport coordination broke down. The fabric of society, as I put it to Uma, was destroyed. And all of it brought back the whole question of what democracy really means — when the exercise of democracy is the justification for shutting down the systems that people need to survive.

They didn't only disenfranchise the communication bit. They limited the transaction layer. And all of that brought back the whole question of what democracy really means.

The Part Nobody Wants to Hear

When Uma asked about the positives, my mind had already gone there. Because there were positives — uncomfortable ones.

There is what I call social media rot. It has taken over the society. Africa has a median population age of about 16. These young people are supposed to be productive, and instead their attention is dying. They are being fed propaganda, trapped on TikTok, hooked to platforms designed not to empower them but to keep them scrolling. A lot of problems stem from never stopping to realize that you are actually trapped.

During the shutdown, people disconnected from their phones. Families came together. People had room to think, to strategize, to organize their lives. I told Uma that if I could achieve broad enough support for the idea, I would intentionally schedule Internet breaks — make connectivity unreliable on a Sunday afternoon. Not as oppression. As hygiene. A personal Internet shutdown is something most people need and will never voluntarily choose.

What I appreciate about Bitchat's design is that it avoids this toxicity entirely. There is no feed. No algorithm. No engagement optimization. It is communication infrastructure, not an attention harvesting machine. That distinction matters more than most people realize. I wanted Uma's readers to understand: there is bad ethics baked into how we consume the Internet right now, and it is not a side effect. It is the business model.

Privacy the Government Cannot Touch

Uma raised the claim from the head of Uganda's communication authority that the government could track and block Bitchat users. I explained why this is almost certainly wrong.

If I open Bitchat at a polling station, my app might show that 20 other users are nearby. But I do not know who they are. They do not know who I am. Identification requires direct interaction — someone choosing to disclose themselves. The only way to confirm a specific person is using Bitchat would be to arrest them and physically inspect their phone. And even then, the panic mode — triple-tap the logo — wipes everything instantly.

The head of the UCC likely assumed that because the network is open-source, it is also transparent in the surveillance sense. But open does not mean traceable. It is the same misconception people have about Bitcoin: because the ledger is public, they assume identities are attached. They are not. With Bitcoin, investigators can sometimes work backwards from exchanges where identity meets the blockchain. But Bitchat has no such exchange layer. There is no on-ramp where real identity and encrypted identity overlap. My chats from the previous period were already gone when I checked during the interview — the system works exactly as designed.

You Are the Infrastructure Now

The real limitation of Bitchat is not technical. It is philosophical. Traditional Internet communication relies on service providers to move your messages. Bitchat brings that responsibility to you and me and millions of others — to be available for each other as communication infrastructure. You have to have the app running. You have to keep Bluetooth on. You become a node in someone else's chain, for messages between senders and receivers you will never know.

This is exactly why Bitcoin's growth has been slow. Both technologies introduce personal responsibility in places where people are used to outsourcing it. That is a barrier to entry. But the more people get used to that barrier, the less it feels like one.

And the technology is open-source. Whatever limitations exist today will be solved — maybe by Bitchat, maybe by what comes next. The Bitcoin wallet people used in 2012 is not the one they use now. But the underlying architecture — decentralized, encrypted, peer-to-peer — that was the unlock. We cannot unlearn that messages can move via Bluetooth mesh. In the Bitcoin space, we have a saying: it is going up forever. The evil in the world only gets smarter, so the good has to get smarter too.

Whoever is in a state where they are oppressing their people on communication — keep it up long enough. Humanity has a way of building an alternative infrastructure.

The Harder Question

This is the part I recorded after Uma and I said goodbye. I was sitting alone, about to leave Rome after the African Land Forces Summit, trying to capture what I was actually getting at before it evaporated.

The West tends to look at itself as the source of truth on democracy. But majority of the time, what the world needs is not democracy — at least not in the form currently practiced. The question is whether the mode of leadership is the problem, or the framework itself.

Would there even be a need for Bitchat if there were no need to practice democracy in a form that can become a time-wasting, money-wasting layer for a continent that still needs to build its foundational systems? We are going through an election, but is that the most urgent thing a government should be prioritizing? Whether a government has lasted 30 years — whether that is bad or good — depends entirely on context. And context is what we lose whenever we assess democracy's advantages and decide to keep applying the template without question.

A nation-state with a very young population needs stability. It needs to work hard to grow itself to a point where it can enjoy what democracy promises. Does democracy need to exist first for those benefits to arrive? Or do the benefits of democracy depend on infrastructure that has to be built before democracy can function? Can you build that infrastructure successfully with democracy already running?

I am not resolving this question. I am putting it out there for everyone to evaluate. The tools work. Bitchat works. Encrypted communication works. Bluetooth mesh works. But the context in which these tools become necessary — a continent asked to practice expensive democratic rituals while its children need food, its entrepreneurs need reliable power, its hospitals need Internet that does not get switched off every election cycle — that context deserves scrutiny too.

* * *

In every place where there will be a dictator, there will be a form of Bitchat. The human problems never change — only the way they manifest. I believe that. I also believe we owe it to ourselves to ask whether the problem is only the dictator, or also the system we imported to replace him.

Being an entrepreneur, politics is not interesting to me — it takes away time that is not rewarded, and I am still very early in my journey. My form of protest against what is happening in Uganda is to be part of the solution: to build, to empower, to stay in my lane. But staying in my lane does not mean staying quiet about the lane itself. The road needs better foundations. And the tools to communicate that — encrypted, decentralized, untouchable — are finally here.

I live in the vacation destination. When people come for vacation, they come to me. The weather is good, the sun is good, the food is clean and organic. I love Europe — it is nice. But I love home. And home needs more than elections. It needs the infrastructure that makes freedom mean something.