Tweeting village chief foils thieves

LANET UMOJA, Kenya -- When the chief of this western Kenyan village got an urgent 4 a.m. call that thieves were invading a schoolteacher's home, he sent a Twitter message. In minutes, residents gathered outside the home, and the thugs fled.

"My wife and I were terrified," said teacher Michael Kimotho. "But the alarm raised by the chief helped."

The tweet from Chief Francis Kariuki was only his latest attempt to improve village life using the micro-blogging site Twitter. Kariuki regularly sends out tweets about missing children and farm animals, showing that the power of social media has reached even into a dusty African village, 100 miles west of Nairobi.

"There is a brown and white sheep which has gone missing with a nylon rope around its neck and it belongs to Mwangi's father," he tweeted recently in Swahili. The sheep was recovered.

Kariuki said that even the thieves follow him on Twitter. Earlier, the chief tweeted about the theft of a cow, and it was found later, abandoned, tied to a pole.

Kariuki's Twitter page shows 300 followers, but the former teacher estimated that thousands of the 28,000 residents in his area receive the messages he sends out directly and indirectly.

He said many of his constituents, mostly subsistence farmers, cannot afford smart phones, but can access tweets through a third-party mobile phone application. Others forward the tweets via text message. -- AP