If you search
for the name of Ethiopia’s prime minister, MelesZenawi, on Twitter these days, you’ll see a flurry of
incongruent postings: Meles is hospitalized in critical
condition; he’s fine and returning to work; he died two weeks ago;
he’s on holiday.
Journalists for international news outlets have tried to sort out fact from
rumor, but they’ve gotten no help from Ethiopian government officials who
offered only vague assurances that the country’s longtime leader was ill but
recovering. In Ethiopia, where the government has imposed increasingly
repressive measures on the domestic press corps, news coverage has been minimal
and contradictory.
International
news outlets, such as Reuters, The
Associated Press, and the BBC, reported last
week that Meles was hospitalized for an undisclosed
condition. Reuters, citing diplomatic sources, said he was being treated in
Brussels, although even that scant nugget of information was not officially
confirmed.
Back home,
generally pro-government papers such as Addis Fortunetold readers on Tuesday that Meles
had returned to Addis Ababa and would be back
to work soon. The paper reported that the government provided little other
information on his condition. A day later, though, the weekly The Reporter
claimed that Meles was merely abroad on holiday.
The
government censoredthe one domestic
outlet that tried to report more detailed information. This weekend, the
government ordered the state-run printing company not to produce the latest
edition of the weekly Feteh,
which was to have carried front-page coverage of Meles‘
condition. The weekly, which has faced government harassment in the past over
its critical coverage, had prepared stories citing information from
international news outlets and an exiled Ethiopian group.
“No one
has a clear idea,” said BennoMuechler, a German
freelance reporter based in the capital. Muechler
said he tried to get answers from the government communications office–only to
be asked by officials there if he had any leads he could share. “There is
an information blackout in Ethiopia,” said exiled journalist AbebeGellaw, who works for
the critical exiled broadcaster Ethiopian
Satellite Television. Gellaw noted that most
Ethiopians get their information from the national broadcaster, which has
vaguely reported that Meles is fine and would be back
at his desk soon.
But then,
where is Meles, and why can’t he say this himself?
“There is no trust in the media, with so many rumors. Whatever news that
comes out here, nobody seems to believe it,” Muechler
said.
While the
Ethiopian public may be skeptical, they are definitely seeking answers. Google Trendsreports that searches for Meles
have spiked this month, climbing far higher than at any point since the
tracking’s earliest date, in 2004. Public speculation about Meles
began spreading in mid-July after the premier was conspicuously absent from theAfrican
Union Summit held in Addis Ababa. He also missed the
ratification of the national budget and the official closing of parliament,
according to local reports.
Journalists’
hopes that a government press conference held after the AU summit would clear
up the confusion were quickly dashed. “The only thing new that came out of
the press conference […] was the official breaking of government silence that
has hovered over the issue for three weeks,” Tesfalem Waldyes wrote in Addis Fortune.
Government spokesman Bereket Simon revealed only that
the prime minister was recovering from an illness, was “exhausted”
from his workload despite his “Herculean ability,” and would be back
at work soon, according to local reports.
When
reporters asked about all the secrecy, Bereket’s
response was telling. He said the government did not want to “make a
public relations piece out of it” and that the circumspection “is the
culture of our party,” according to The Reporter.
Ethiopia’s
ruling party has never been open to the public. Despite Bereket’s
promises in the past to hold press conferences every two weeks with Meles meeting the press every two months, the government
has held only two press conferences in the last eight months and it has been
more a year since the prime minister met with the press, according to local
reports. “There is a power vacuum at the moment, and so the information is
hidden,” said one local journalist, who spoke on condition of anonymity
because he feared government reprisal for offering critical comments. “The
media has always been controlled by the state so the media has never developed
investigative journalism in Ethiopia, and we are lost for answers.”
This
information vacuum can have a detrimental effect on both the public and the
government. Rumors, rather than facts, inform public opinion, and public
confidence in the government is eroded. “Whenever you deliberately spread
misinformation, you lose people’s trust,” Abebe
told me. “The impact for the government is that it loses
credibility.” The silence over Meles is the
“old school way of doing things,” writes the Kenya-based Nationcolumnist MwendawaMicheni.
“Presidents never went down with a cold, even in the cold months; jesters
were regular features and public accounting totally absent, something that
locked the continent’s potential for decades,” Micheni
writes. “But even as the continent strives to get unchained, a few leaders
are stuck in the mud.”
(Reporting
from Nairobi)
Tom Rhodes is CPJ’s East Africa consultant, based in Nairobi. Rhodes is a founder of southern Sudan’s first independent newspaper. Follow him on Twitter: @africamedia_CPJ
