Africa and the Covid-19 Information Framing Crisis

"Much of Africa is in the grip of a double Covid-19 crisis. It is a crisis of the pandemic as well as an information framing crisis."

This article argues that public health messaging about the COVID-19 pandemic in Africa is complicated by a competing mix of framings by a number of actors, including the state, the church, civil society, and the public. George Ogola here explores some of these divergences in the interpretation of the disease and how they have given rise to multiple narratives about the pandemic, particularly online. He also considers the role of health journalism on the continent and the ways in which weaknesses in the media sector are contributing to the misinformation and disinformation problem.

Ogola begins by examining the centrality of politics to the COVID-19 "story". He notes that, where the pandemic has exposed weak health systems, "the default response from governments has been denial, secrecy, even official misinformation, primarily because of its political implications. This has in turn encouraged the manufacturing of alternative narratives of the Covid-19 crisis, particularly online." Following "years of official misinformation practices", citizens are taking action. For example, in Kenya, where the state plays the role of regulator and active actor in online spaces, the government created the official hashtag #komeshacorona (Kiswahili for "Stop Corona") for information management regarding the pandemic. In response, Kenyans on Twitter (KOT) created alternative hashtags such as #covid_19ke to anchor their criticism of government responses to the crisis.

As Ogola observes, "When the state cannot be trusted on important national issues such as an international health pandemic, misinformation and disinformation practices proliferate." Human rights and the free flow of information can become the casualty of such policies. For instance, in Tanzania, where the Magufuli government holds a tight rein on the mainstream media, journalists who have questioned state policy relating to the pandemic have been threatened and/or arrested.

In such an environment, rumours can spread quickly. For instance, a video of alleged bodies of the victims of COVID-19 being dumped on the streets, with many others buried in the night, was circulated in WhatsApp groups and on Facebook; the video turned out to be a 2014 footage of dead bodies of refugees washed ashore on the Libyan coast. Such videos not only solidify criticism and distrust of the state but also feed the stigma against those who have recovered from COVID-19. In fact, as Ogola reports, the Kenyan government has appealed to the public to welcome back into the community those who have recovered from COVID-19, perhaps in reaction to the news of a suicide by a survivor of the disease in the country.

Misinformation is also being spread (e.g., via YouTube) by religious leaders across the continent, many with considerable followers online, who frame the pandemic as a battle between faith and science. One example is the Nigerian Islamic scholar Abubakr Imam Aliagan, who has claimed that Muslims are immune from COVID-19.

Ogola argues that mainstream media's institutional deficiences are contributing to public susceptibility to dis/misinformation practices - wherever they originate. He cites the media's "reproduction of internationalised stock phrases, many contextually unhelpful" as a contributor to the "paucity of relatable stories about the pandemic in mainstream media[, which] is partly a result of the lack of investment in health journalism by media organisations in the continent." Resource limitations mean that African health journalists often lack the necessary expertise to understand the pandemic as a health crisis in need of scientific interventions, leading them to instead narrate complex health stories as political stories. "This political domination of the coverage of the pandemic has also revealed a worrying lack of public engagement by local African scientists in a number of countries. It is arguable that they should have been at the forefront of providing distinctly local and relatable interpretations of the pandemic."

Ogola concludes by stressing that, although there is nothing inherently wrong with the existence of different perspectives and/or interpretations of a crisis, "where such framings detract from the crisis itself and become a contestation of individual and/or sector interests, they birth a new crisis. This is the double crisis Africa must now resolve."