Are we ignoring Africa's floods?
Blogged by: Preti Taneja
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Villagers cross the Amonmaka Bridge in a canoe in the northern Uganda town of Lira, September 16, 2007.
REUTERS/Antony Njuguna
REUTERS/Antony Njuguna
The devastating floods that are sweeping east, central and west Africa have been met with a curious silence in the British media.
Scanning the broadsheets this week, there's been plenty of coverage for Prime Minister Gordon Brown's escalating spat with Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe. But the small matter of swathes of a continent under water has gone largely unnoticed.
A day after Reuters released the latest facts and figures on a growing African flood emergency, only The Independent covered the disaster.
A page in the world news section on September 18 with maps, flags, statistics and photos showed that people are affected in at least 15 countries. According to the paper, that's 64 dead in Sudan and more than 250,000 left homeless in Khartoum, 17 dead and 183,000 affected in Ethiopia, 21 dead and 150,000 displaced in Uganda, 12 dead in Kenya and 15 dead and 500 homes washed away in Rwanda.
It is hard to imagine how the Guardian, the Times and the Telegraph could have missed this. Instead, the one story that made the foreign pages of all these papers, (and appeared as a "News in Brief" in the Independent) was about a city crackdown ...on pigeons in Venice.
So why are these floods being ignored when so many people are affected? It's true there is a lot to pick and choose from on the world agenda and papers only have limited space. But even a scan of news websites does not yield much coverage. So lack of space seems a poor argument.
Readership not interested? There are well over 500,000 people of either black African or mixed white and black African origin in Britain. Some of them might have a fleeting interest in what is happening.
Is it the nature of the disaster? Famine in Africa often gets a higher billing in the British press. Images of starving children, cracked earth and fleshless cattle have somehow come to define disaster in African countries. Mothers clutching their children waiting for medical attention at AIDS clinics are also popular.
One BBC journalist who has reported extensively from Kenya described the frustration of an editor trying to understand how the region can have shifted so quickly from severe drought to widespread flooding. "Is it too hot? Is it too wet? - make your mind up!" the editor asked, before deciding not to run the story.
Another problem is access and geography. According to the journalist, when floods devastate Mozambique, reporters based in nearby Johannesburg can get their pictures easily, and that means the flood gets covered.
Conversely, last year's floods in Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia, which a spokesman from the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) told me were the worst in the region for 10 years, hardly made a British News in Brief, let alone a headline. The area was particularly hard to reach, even for aid agencies, the few roads into the worst affected areas were swept away and ongoing conflicts were fuelled further by the fight for resources, making the area even more dangerous. Some news agencies managed to cover the story, with pictures, but the papers still weren't interested.
Maybe newspaper editors just think we're bored of people dying in Africa from "natural disasters" (which of course have nothing to do with climate change, which has nothing to do with Europeans taking cheap flights to sunny Spain every weekend).
Perhaps they've decided it's time to focus on different emergencies in other parts of the world, like Hurricane Felix in Central America. Or perhaps they think we are sick of the sight of rising water so soon after the pictures of a deluged Britain saturated our front pages.
Perhaps that's why only one paper published pictures of Africans up to their waists in water, clutching what few belongings they could rescue from their devastated homes, or rowing their terrified children to safety on makeshift canoes using garden spades.
Media attention is critical in emergencies such as this in raising awareness and mobilising an aid response. Given the sheer scale of this disaster, the lack of news coverage is perplexing at best. At worst, it begins to look like we've tired of Africa's woes and are simply turning away.
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6 responses to “Are we ignoring Africa's floods?”
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22 Sep 2007 09:45:09 GMT
GET IT IN THE NEWS!!! OTHER COUNTRIES ARE IMPORTANT TOO!! ARE WE JUST GOING TO SIT AROUND AND DO NOTHING FOR THESE POOR PEOPLE?
23 Sep 2007 10:32:43 GMT
I received a phone this afternoon alerting me to this devastation. This is the FIRST I had heard although I listen to an all news station at least six hours a day.
My personal effort will be to alert all of my local news stations, followed by contacting any and all of my fellow missionaries that have travelled to Uganda.25 Sep 2007 07:51:05 GMT
If the word does not get out now, we WILL have people starving in a very short time! Here in northern Ghana most of our food storage has been destroyed. The new crops are totally submerged. Crops not submerged were already crippled by drought that preceded the floods. Along all the major rivers in northern Ghana there are villages washing away and people who have had to leave what little they had to save their lives. We need help now !!
25 Sep 2007 07:51:20 GMT
Australians are just as guilty as others in ignoring the flood emergency that has devastated large areas of west and east Africa. Biggest news here is "footy" and the horse flu or equine influenza. As if nothing else exists out there. Unless a radical change in the attitude occurs (such as the that occured when the tsunami hit Asia on Boxing day in 2004) among the general population. I'm not very optimistic about that happening.
27 Sep 2007 11:35:16 GMT
it makes me feel sick to think of bbc fat cats deciding not to run a story just because they haven't got a picture to go with it. dont they realise that by publicising the disaster they could be saving lives. the worst thing is that they may indeed realise this and have still decided not to act. hurricane katrina dominated the news for weeks and yet thousands of afican people effected every day, not only by natural disasters but by extreme poverty, don't even get a mention. if you would like to give help to people in need please visit www.cafod.org.uk. we can do our bit even if the media refuses to do their's.
28 Sep 2007 16:43:40 GMT
Since the Independent ran its story on September 18, just over a week ago, the floods have received some much needed coverage in the other parts of the Brtish press. The Guardian correspondent John Vidal reported from Uganda with an eyewitness account, the headline read 'African deluge brings misery to 1.5m people.' The paper also reported the joint aid agency appeal that has been launched; the story includes some mind boggling figures - 650,000 displaced and almost 200 drowned, an astonishing rise on what the Independent reported just a few days before. An online photogallery on the Guardian website posted a couple of days after the Independent story shows just how effective pictures can be in bringing home the scale of the disaster and its impact on individuals. The disaster got a backhanded mention in a News in Brief in the Times in a three line story about cult leaders being arrested for saying the floods represent the end of t! he world. No facts, no statistics, no direct voices and no pictures. The Telegraph, which is Britain's biggest selling 'quality' (I use speech marks because the term refers to what used to be called 'broadsheet' but since the size of many British papers have recently changed, 'quality' is now widely used instead,) as far as I can tell still has no mention of the disaster. One commentator above has criticised the BBC on this issue, in fact my article referred to the print media - BBC newsonlne posted its report before the Independent , and makes use of the range of technology at its disposal, including the website, audio and visual reports. The story has also been featured on Channel 4 news; the accompanying website story says 'Africa - a continent more used to dealing with droughts' which is a bit misleading since many African countires experience droughts and floods - see www.em-dat.net for a country /disaster breakdown. Interestingly the Financial Times covered the stor! y the day after the Independent, and given its target readership - the movers and shakers of big business and high-ups of governments, this might be the most important place for the story to be reported at all. But neither the BBC, C4 or the FT have updated their stories as far as I can tell, and there is a risk that any impact the initial piece made will, by now, be lost. There's no doubt there is a link between ongoing coverage and the success of any humaniarian appeal, so its a tragic shame more of the British press have not kept this huge disaster in the public eye.