The Internet in East Africa: An aid or a weapon?

The Internet in East Africa: An aid or a weapon?

20 June, 2011 | By Tom Rhodes/CPJ East Africa Consultant
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Frank Nyakairu has seen it all. A veteran war reporter, he has
covered the horrors of northern Uganda and Somalia, among
others places. And throughout this time of rich but often appalling
experiences, he has also seen the auspicious--and sometimes
terrifying--impact the Internet has had on East African reporters.

Nyakairu spoke at a recent

workshop held in Johannesburg,

South Africa, co-organized by

Global Voices

, Google Africa,

and CPJ. Attendees at the

conference comprised some of

the most active African bloggers

and online reporters on the

continent who came to learn

how to sharpen their online

reporting skills while avoiding the

censors.

porting since 1999, Nyakairu

has seen how the Internet has

improved his ability to transmit stories even when based in the
most precarious rural locations. And, as the Internet seems to gain
exponential popularity in the region, it has become a tool for
Nyakairu to crosscheck his writing with fellow online reporters.
For a long time, he said, Internet use for journalists in East Africa
was open, free territory.

When he was reporting on the war in northern Uganda in 2001 for
the leading independent daily Monitor, government authorities
shuttered the newspaper for a week. But the government did not
bother closing down the paper's website. "At the time only 32,000
had access to the Internet in Uganda, who cared about the
influence of websites at that time?" Nyakairu told me. But this
decade has launched a new precedent in communications for East
Africans and the entire continent. Now 120 million Africans are on
the Internet, according to Internet World Stats.

Since 2001, governments in East Africa have changed their
attitudes toward the Web, especially in relation to the social
movements in Tunisia and Egypt that made extensive use of social
media tools to foment political change.

"WikiLeaks touched every single government and no one is in
control," Nyakairu told me during a break in the conference.
"Imagine if similar, regional sites like WikiLeaks enter the playing
field? Governments around here won't like that."

In fact, regional East African versions of WikiLeaks are already
here. Jamii Forums, a Tanzanian Swahili-language website acts
as platform for the public to publish material anonymously. The
site is popular, with around 32,000 visitors per day, the online
editor of Jamii Forums, Mbaraka Islam, told me. The
government has noted the site's influence and is wary. In April, at
a party congress held by the ruling Chama cha Mapinduzi Party
(Party of the Revolution), the vice-chairman singled out Jamii
Forums as a "dangerous critic" and accused the site of actively
trying to undermine the government. Since then, Islam told me,
suspected government supporters have inundated the site with
anonymous postings that criticize the forum and support the
government in a "cyber sabotage" effort--a tactic also used by the
government of Sudan. "Trust me, we are going to see more and
more government resources being used to suppress the power of
the Internet," Nyakairu said.

U.N. Special Rapporteur Frank La Rue reached similar
foreboding conclusions at a U.N. Human Rights Council meeting
in Geneva earlier this month. "Governments are using increasingly
sophisticated technologies to block content, and to monitor and
identify activists and critics," he said at the meeting.

The reactions of governments across East Africa are indicative of
La Rue's warnings. Since last year, the region has had two
separate cases of online journalists facing serious legal charges for
critical online opinion pieces.

The online editor of Net Press in Burundi, Jean-Claude
Kavumbagu, faced treason charges--a lifetime prison sentence for
an unbylined opinion piece in July 2010 and spent 10 months in
prison before the charges were finally dropped. In neighboring
Uganda, authorities raided the office of The Uganda Record and
charged its online editor, Timothy Kalyegira, with sedition for a
critical online opinion piece. When Kalyegira attempted to retrieve
his passport from the police so that he could attend this workshop
in South Africa, they detained him overnight and reinstituted the
criminal libel charges.

Ethiopia continues to use sophisticated Internet filtering equipment
to block websites, including CPJ's, since the state-owned
telecommunications company has monopoly control over Internet
access and mobile lines. Even though there are four Internet
service providers in Rwanda, the government keeps a close, cozy
relationship with them allowing them to censor independent news
sites such as Umusingi and occasionally Umuvugizi.

The Internet has proven to be a useful tool for reporters and,
unfortunately, the censors. "I remember when I got in trouble with
the government back in 2001 in Uganda, I almost feared my own
shadow," Nyakairu recalled. Security agents had to go to great
lengths to locate his home and phone number, he said. "Now so
many security personnel are jobless, due to social media. This is
one danger reporters face: Social media has made intelligence
gathering very, very easy."

During the Google conference, CPJ Internet Advocacy
Coordinator Danny O'Brien spoke along with international
advocacy organization Tactical Tech's Bobby Soriano about a
number of software programs that can easily be used to snoop on
the public. There are free, downloadable applications, for
instance, that allows the user to infiltrate Facebook pages or a
WiFi connection.

The Internet can clearly be a reporter's best friend--and its worst
enemy. "It's like a stick, you can use it to walk or to use it to beat
someone," Nyakairu said.

After the two-day conference, my mind was spinning with some of
the threats and challenges online reporters either currently or will
soon face in East Africa. Fortunately, O'Brien and Soriano also
showed attendants some simple, practical online tools that we can
all use to safeguard our identity and work online securely. I
suggest everyone keep reading O'Brien's useful blogs on our
Internet Channel to stay safe.
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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

Courtesy