Issue No. 1

 

‘Ethiopia declares state of emergency in Amhara region.’ ‘Somali government kills 40 Al-Shabaab fighters.’ ‘Eritrean President meets Putin.’ Such are the rolling stories that flash up on the ticker tape of international news of late. Yet tumult in the Horn of Africa is regularly overshadowed by events elsewhere in the world. Like the war in Ukraine. This has rightfully seen reams covering nearly every moment of the conflict since the full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022. Yet the similarly devastating Tigray War was barely touched on by major international news outlets.

Across the Horn, the media landscape is similarly gloomy. Intense political polarisation and repression have skewed the region’s media. Poor distribution of news coverage and high rates of illiteracy have stunted the development of print media in several countries. Online harassment of writers and commentators has become ubiquitous in the region. The language of ‘fake news’ and anti-journalist rhetoric have sanctioned the abuse many journalists now face. Targeting critical journalists using online troll armies has become a popular tool for unscrupulous politicians.

Press freedom differs widely across the Horn. It ranges from the generally free press of Kenya to extreme repression in Eritrea. Two of the longest-serving and most repressive presidents in Sub-Saharan Africa, Isaias Afwerki and Yoweri Museveni, don’t help. And the government of Djibouti’s President Ismail Omar Guelleh, in power since 1999, maintains its own state-controlled media.

Eritrea’s control, however, is particularly extreme. Few stories leak out of Asmara, capital of the so-caleld ‘North Korea’ of Africa; those that do are generally tragic. Round-ups of youth for indefinite military service, harsh labour in mines, and the Eritrean military’s brutality in the Tigray War are sadly typical stories. Independent media was banned in Eritrea in 2001 in the aftermath of the Badme War. What remains is a handful of ‘news’ outlets spewing regime propaganda. Eritreans in the diaspora depend on foreign media outlets to discover what’s happening in their own country.

Access to online news is also heavily restricted in Eritrea, with just 1.3% of the population with internet access as of 2019, as estimated by the International Telecommunication Union. An unknown number of journalists have been and remain imprisoned in the country’s numerous prisons.

In neighbouring Ethiopia, political polarisation has bled into the media landscape. The rise of internal armed conflicts, often with ethnic dimensions, has led to once-respected press outlets spouting ever more extreme positions. Dozens of journalists have been arbitrarily arrested and imprisoned for covering these conflicts.
The ethno-federal politics of Ethiopia is reflected in distribution of the country’s media. Private media outlets specialise in Ethiopia’s regions or among its ethnicities. Ethnic differences have driven their popularity over that of state-owned media outlets. Mirroring this is online polarisation in which supporters clash, whipping up highly charged rhetoric. Several newspapers remain critically independent, however, including Addis Standard.

The situation is more positive in Kenya, but still generally unfavourable to many journalists. With well over 100 radio stations and dozens of TV channels, the majority of Kenyans enjoy free and easy access to news. Freedom of the Press is protected in Kenya’s Constitution. But politicians still routinely pressure media outlets, particularly on sensitive stories relating to terrorism, religion, and elections.

Another constraint on news coverage in the Horn is the impact of towering events, as in Ukraine and recent coups in West Africa. When the Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin's plane crashed in Russia, the BRICS summit was convening in South Africa. As cameras scanned the crash site, many diaspora Eritreans didn’t know that Isaias Afwerki was attending the summit.

Yet the worst for media in the Horn may still come with the advent of Artificial Intelligence, and its capacity to render increasingly accurate ‘deep-fakes.’ In the Horn it is eminently possible that groups will try to use AI to influence politics and steer elections. In addition, Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) are under repeated criticism for their failure to prevent online hate speech and incitement to violence. Whether they can effectively control dangeous disinformation is yet to be seen.

A mixture of repression, international disinterest, and political polarisation paints a pretty bleak picture for journalists in the Horn. But there are still critical media that hold governments to account here. A free and open media is a bedrock of democracy.

By the Horn Edition team