Category: Entertainment

Last year I wrote an article titled Halloween and Eritrea. When I have now read it, exactly one year later, I felt the title misrepresented the contents of the article because the article narrates the ghost story of only one specific ethnic group. This article deals with some of Eritrea’s ethnic groups’ traditions related to ghosts. So, get ready to be spooked!

In the Tigre ethnic group there are a lot of rituals used to drive away ghosts, preventing them from taking over dead people’s souls. In one of these rituals whenever a person dies the family cooks porridge just before the burial ceremony and places it beside the body to divert the attention of the ghosts from the dead body’s soul.

There is also the ritural of Zar, a term for a demon or spirit assumed to possess individuals and to cause discomfort or illness. The zar ritual is the practice of exorcising spirits from the possessed individual. Zar exorcism is almost fading in the contemporary urban culture morphing into women-only entertainment. Zar gatherings involve food and musical performances culminating in ecstatic dancing that lasts for three to seven nights.

Another ritual used to drive away ghosts, which is common in the Tigrigna ethnic group, is associated with fairies. In Eritrean folklores, fairies are considered as ghosts of the dead. A considerable amount of the lore revolves around changelings, fairy children left in the place of stolen human babies. The swapped child is afflicted with unexplained diseases, disorders or disabilities. To drive away ghosts from new born babies, they place a cold iron bar under the baby’s bed, hang charms of various herbs around the baby’s neck or simply shun locations known to the fairies and avoid offending any fairies.

In the kunama ethnic group there is a ghost story that has been told for many years. In a village called Fodie there were two kids who were living with their stepmother because their mother had died due to terrible diseases when they were very young. Their father had no choice but to remarry in order for him to go out and work on the field while the woman took care of the babies. Unfortunately, the kids’ stepmom was very mean. She acted like she was taking care of the kids in front of the husband but treated them harshly when he was out of sight. She didn’t feed them properly and told them to venture into the woods and caves in the village with the intention to get them hurt. Every morning they went into one of the caves in the village and came out by noon looking very ecstatic. The stepmom was so curious why they were gaining weight even though she was not feeding them. She sent her little brother to spy on the kids while they were at the cave. What her brother saw was so strange to her ears that she decided to see what the kids were up to. She watched in disbelief when the kids greeted a ghost-like figure in front of the cave and then disappeared into the cave. She rushed inside and saw that the cave was the exact replica of what people assumed heaven would look like. There was a water fountain, a garden with several fruits, a spring of milk and honey. So annoyed that the kids were very well looked after by the ghost, the stepmom uttered some disrespectful words to the ghost and started walking out of the cave. However, she felt her energy getting sucked out of her body. Soon she fell to the ground and died instantly. It’s widely believed that the ghost took over the stepmom’s soul.

The day the stepmom died is celebrated in today’s kunama ethnic group by heading to the cave. Not everyone is allowed to participate in the ceremony. Elected members of the community wearing clothes made just for the occasion head to the cave singing a song that is believed to have been once sung by the kids as an appreciation to the ghost. The elected members perform a ritual dance some 50 meters away from the front of the cave and then the cave magically becomes visible displaying the fountain of water and the other things there. The cave turns into a normal dull cave once the ritual is over. The participants of the ritual believe the soul of the stepmom is still trapped inside the cave since most of them say they hear a high-pitched scream every time they go there.

It is widely believed that Halloween is the celebration of the devil, but many say the opposite. This time of the year my family has a tradition of visiting the graveyards of some of our dead family members. The visit is very brief since most of us don’t like staying at such places for long. But I believe it’s a good family tradition that families should practice.

Source: Ministry of Information Eritrea

A Chinese national has filed a challenge at the Malawi High Court against a 14-year jail sentence, which a lower court gave him last month after he was convicted of three wildlife crimes.

Lin Yunhua is allegedly a leader of an African wildlife trafficking syndicate known as the Lin-Zhang gang, named after the husband-and-wife leaders. It has operated out of Malawi for at least a decade.

Malawi authorities arrested Lin in August 2019 following a three-month manhunt. Police said he was found with the horns of five rhinos chopped into 103 pieces.

Last month, the magistrate’s court in the capital, Lilongwe, handed down the prison sentence.

Chrispine Ndalama, Lin’s attorney, said, “I can simply say that we have filed the notice of appeal, but we are still consulting with our client on how to move forward. But we haven’t yet filed any documentation; we just filed the notice of appeal, because you need to appeal within the period of 30 days after the judgment has been delivered.”

Ndalama said the appeal asks the court to reduce the 14-year sentence on the ground that Lin was a first-time offender, among other reasons.

In all, Malawian authorities have sent 14 people to prison in connection with the trafficking syndicate, including Lin’s wife and son-in-law.

Lin’s daughter was also arrested in December 2020 for alleged money laundering offenses. Her case is ongoing.

Sentence lauded

Wildlife campaigners have commended Lin’s sentence, saying it would help deter other would-be wildlife traffickers from committing similar crimes.

Mary Rice, executive director of the London-based Environmental Investigation Agency, an organization campaigning against environmental crimes and abuse, said the 14-year sentence was appropriate.

“I think to be honest the sentence is fair and commensurate with all charges filed against him,” Rice said. “So I am sure the prosecution will counter the appeal, and I guess the case rumbles on.”

Brighton Kumchedwa, director of Malawi’s Department of National Parks & Wildlife, said the government was ready to face Lin again in court.

“In the first place, it is his right to appeal,” Kumchedwa said, “but yeah, we are very ready for him, just as we did in a lower court. It is our hope and prayer that probably [we will] come be back victorious.”

Kumchedwa said the country is now experiencing a decline in wildlife trafficking.

“I think following the hefty sentences that are coming from the courts, we are seeing a reduction indeed of these cases related to ivory trafficking,” Kumchedwa said. “I don’t have a figure on top of my head, but suffice to say that there is a decline.”

The High Court has yet to set a date to hear Lin’s appeal.

Source: Voice of America

When we asked readers to nominate their unsung champions of the NHS, we were overwhelmed by moving stories about staff from all parts of the health service, not least their sheer courage, compassion and dedication during the pandemic.

Last week, our finalists received their awards from the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, at Downing Street. Here, we tell their inspiring stories, starting with our overall winner.

It was following a serious incident, where a young woman with an eating disorder was violently resisting having a nasogastric tube inserted, requiring six staff members to help, that Mebrak Ghebrehiwet became determined to make changes.

So after each shift — and she was working six days a week — this recently qualified mental health nurse went home and spent hour after hour consulting textbooks, reading as much background material as she could into the psychology of eating disorders.

And thanks to her dedication and research, the use of restraint at St Ann’s Eating Disorders Service in London, where she worked, has plummeted, and what she’s done could ultimately help patients in similar units around the country.

For those helping people with eating disorders, forced nasogastric feeding is a particularly stressful part of their job. This is used as an absolute last resort, but without it the patient will die.

These are desperately ill patients, shockingly emaciated but who genuinely believe they are overweight. Some have to be fed in this way daily, for weeks.

Although it is lifesaving, forced nasogastric feeding is deeply traumatising for the patient, and the staff, too, as the patient may need to be held down and restrained with force.

Often those affected have a history of trauma, such as abuse, and this experience can echo that trauma, say psychiatrists.

And the staff, who’ve chosen mental health to support these patients and champion their rights, find themselves in a situation where they’re at risk of traumatising the very people they want to help — so they, too, can need counselling afterwards.

Mebrak, 45, identified small problems that raised stress levels and ultimately led to restraint.

As she explains: ‘The ward runs like clockwork, and the patients rely on routine. They’re anxious already, worrying about how they will cope with the stress of their next meal, and anything small that affects this tight schedule can set off a catastrophic chain of events.’

Mebrak worked out simple steps to minimise this kind of anxiety, such as printing menus for the patient to lessen the risk of serving them the wrong meal or different food than they were expecting.

She devised a ‘getting to know you’ form — a simple patient questionnaire on admission, giving personal likes and dislikes, after noticing that patients can ‘take a long time to open up’.

So a simple form that states ‘what TV they like to watch, the music they enjoy, and the things they know can calm them down, gives staff an at-a-glance chance to understand more about the person they are helping.

‘If that patient becomes agitated, then the staff can use something from the form to help calm them.’

Another step involved providing staff with a copy of the shift allocation, so that they’re aware of who else is working and can therefore organise tasks and manage their time more efficiently — in turn, freeing them to talk to anxious patients.

These steps ‘sparked a real cultural change and made a massive difference on our wards’, says Dr Yoav Jacob, a consultant psychiatrist at St Ann’s, who nominated Mebrak for a Daily Mail Health Hero Award.

‘Mebrak realised that while restraints had to happen, it didn’t have to be adversarial,’ he says. ‘Now, we have patients who are restrained to be fed, but who will sit and watch a film with a nurse straight afterwards.’

As well as this achievement, Mebrak’s compassion has been singled out for praise by many patients and their families.

One had spent more than six years mostly on the ward, yet incredibly has now been discharged, with her parents saying that Mebrak’s kindness, even when their daughter had to be restrained, stood out.

Spending her own money on buying books according to patients’ particular interests is just another example of Mebrak’s kindness — as is buying, on her day off, a toy rabbit for a highly distressed patient. Dr Jacob says: ‘She goes above and beyond her duties in a really tough environment.’

During the pandemic, Mebrak has worked on her days off, helping keep the unit open while others across the UK were forced to close because of staff sickness or redeployment.

But as Mebrak explains: ‘Coronavirus meant the patients couldn’t have visitors, which was really upsetting. We only had critical patients on the ward, and I felt lucky that with all the uncertainty and fear circulating, I was able to keep working and feel useful.’ And when Mebrak wasn’t at work, she’d be helping in many other ways — donning PPE in the evening to take blood samples from a housebound neighbour, for instance, delivering it to the hospital the next day, and shopping for those who couldn’t.

‘The work that modest people like Mebrak, who never sought a promotion, do on the frontline, especially this past year, deserves recognition,’ Dr Jacob says.

That work has now indeed been recognised — with Mebrak Ghebrehiwet being announced as the overall winner at this year’s Daily Mail Health Hero Awards.

After the ceremony at Downing Street last Wednesday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that as well as being ‘incredibly proud of every single worker in the NHS’, he was also delighted to ‘personally applaud those special people among us who have gone above and beyond for the NHS’.

On receiving the award, Mebrak said she was ‘absolutely gobsmacked and overwhelmed’ to win the top prize, and hoped it would shine a spotlight on the efforts of staff working in mental health wards.

Mebrak says her own struggles as a teenager helped her understand patients. She arrived in the UK from Eritrea at age 14, not speaking any English. ‘I felt extremely alone,’ she says, ‘and I’m aware of what it’s like to think nobody understands you.

‘I was lucky because I had the support of my brothers and sisters; but I had friends with mental health problems — and as I witnessed their struggles, I decided I wanted to be a psychotherapist.’

At 17, Mebrak was at university studying psychology but became pregnant. ‘I tried desperately to study but it was too hard while also raising a child alone,’ she says.

So she worked instead as a hospital administrator for 17 years while raising her son, Akeem, now 27, before retraining as a nurse and qualifying in 2017.

Mebrak, who lives in North London, explains what drew her to working in mental health: ‘As a student nurse, I did a placement on the eating disorders ward, and as the patients started to tell me about their struggles, it really resonated with me.

‘Mental health felt like a calling. There was no question that I would do anything else.’

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• Mebrak Ghebrehiwet, originally from Eritrea, qualified as a nurse four years ago

• Hailed by Prime Minister for her ‘heroic’ work in transforming care for patients

• Miss Ghebrehiwet awarded the top prize at the Daily Mail’s Health Hero Awards

Arriving in the UK from war-torn Eritrea at the age of 14, Mebrak Ghebrehiwet was unable to speak English and often felt like an ‘outcast’.

Now, after qualifying as a nurse just four years ago, she has been hailed by the Prime Minister for her ‘heroic’ work in transforming care for patients suffering eating disorders.

Miss Ghebrehiwet, 45, was awarded the top prize at the Daily Mail’s Health Hero Awards last night.

She was among seven finalists nominated by Mail readers for making extraordinary sacrifices to help patients during the pandemic.

Presenting the healthcare workers with their awards at Downing Street, Boris Johnson said: ‘You guys saved my life and you got the whole country back on its feet.’

The Prime Minister, who was admitted to intensive care with Covid last year before recovering, said the past 18 months had been ‘a truly exhausting and tragic time for the country’.

He added: ‘On behalf of the Government, thank you for what you have done and congratulations to the Daily Mail for this initiative. I am incredibly proud of every single worker in the NHS.

‘There is no doubt that these heroes saved my life, along with thousands of others, and they did so at enormous personal sacrifice without hesitancy.’

The Mail’s Health Hero Awards, sponsored by eBay, were launched in 2013 to honour unsung heroes in healthcare.

Miss Ghebrehiwet, whose native Eritrea fought for independence from Ethiopia for decades, said she was ‘absolutely gobsmacked and overwhelmed’ to win the top prize and hoped it would shine a spotlight on the efforts of staff working in mental health wards.

The mother-of-one said: ‘I arrived in the UK from Eritrea at the age of 14 not speaking any English.

‘I felt extremely alone and I am aware of what it’s like to feel an outcast or to think that nobody understands you.

‘There were times where I really struggled and those years made me aware of mental health issues.’

The nurse worked her days off throughout the pandemic to ensure the specialist eating disorder ward at St Ann’s Hospital in Tottenham, north London, remained open while many others had to close due to staff shortages.

She was nominated for her heroic work in devising ways of minimising the use of forcible restraint on patients.

Most are young girls with illnesses such as anorexia.

Restraint is a last resort in the treatment of eating disorders and involves feeding patients through a plastic tube inserted through the nostril into their stomach.

The process can be a traumatic experience.

Her thoughtful initiatives, such as printing off menus in advance to help reduce patients’ anxiety around food, led to a dramatic fall in the use of restraint methods on the ward.

Many patients and their families singled out Miss Ghebrehiwet for her acts of compassion, which included spending her own money to buy them books or soft toys.

Even after finishing exhausting days at work she would always put others first, with acts such as doing shopping for vulnerable neighbours during the pandemic.

Miss Ghebrehiwet, who has won a £5,000 luxury holiday, said she hoped to visit Peru with her son Akeem, 27.

Ellie Orton OBE, chief executive of NHS Charities Together, said: ‘The people of the NHS are its beating heart and their efforts to care for us are something to be truly celebrated. Every day in the UK there are doctors, nurses, porters and paramedics – people from all walks of life – working tirelessly to keep us safe and healthy.

‘The Health Hero Awards are so important because they give us a chance to give back to our healthcare professionals and show exactly how grateful we are to them.

‘Every single one of these finalists has changed people’s lives – and if that doesn’t make a hero, I don’t know what does.’

Source: Dehai Eritrea Online

In this article, I would like to share my personal opinion about one industry for development that is so often discussed: tourism. Before we attempt to invest heavily in tourism, we should ask these questions: What kind of tourism do we want to see in Eritrea?

Do we have adequate infrastructure for sustainable tourism? If not, what can we learn from other countries that are waking up to the devastating and irreparable damage mass tourism has inflicted to the land, the environment and biodiversity? Do we want to see ostentatious five-star hotels, overcrowded sea-sides, plastic bottles, and piles of rubbish left by careless tourists on our seashores or the development of a sustainable, environmentally and traditionally blended, tourism in Eritrea?

We, Eritreans, gave our lives for freedom and we are still defending our country today. As young freedom fighters, we might not have known much about sustainable development, but we dreamed of a green Eritrea. We used to say, “We will make Eritrea Green.” It was our motto. It is quite unimaginable to dream of that while fighting and paying priceless young lives every day. It feels surreal that we had such confidence and absolute certainty that the Eritrean people would achieve independence and develop a ‘Green Eritrea’. We did just that in 1991 after 30 years of fighting, and our green dream is, slowly but surely, making progress.

In regard to tourism, Eritrea is blessed with outstanding beauty and wildlife, including the northern and southern Red Sea, the rich and lush land of Barka, and our national historical museum, Sahel, the sweet temperature and beautiful landscape of the highland, including our pretty capital city, Asmara. Perhaps pursuing a sustainable, locally-led, traditional hosting model of tourism might help protect Eritrea’s natural habitats and pristine environments. Such a strategy could enable communities to build their economies without harming the environment, allowing local wildlife to thrive and visitors to enjoy untouched destinations, while contributing to the country’s economic development.

Regarding sustainability and environmental safety, Eritrea can learn from the environmental devastation caused by modern day mass tourism and the knowledge of those countries that are getting the balance right. One way to do this is through community-led sustainable tourism strategy.

A community-led sustainable tourism strategy is built on three pillars — environmental, socio-cultural and economic sustainability. The first step is to develop sustainable tourism anchored on history, culture and national traditions. This will help maintain or improve the environmental conditions in the region where it is implemented. The next step is to have a positive impact, both socially and culturally, on the local population. The third step is to ensure that Eritrean communities are stakeholders of these projects and share revenues that they can use for their well-being and the preservation of their local environment, history and culture.

In my opinion, the real beauty of Eritrea lies in the untold history of the Eritrean people’s resilience in adversity and the harmony, kindness, respect and caring culture among all ethnicities and religious beliefs. Eritrea’s beauty and attractions are its history of formidable struggle against colonialism and occupation. The attractions are the determination of its children to live free from occupation, oppression, poverty, inequality and fear. Our history will generate more income when many of us are inspired to do research, paint, draw, write books and make films. Once the national infrastructure is in place, the development of simple, natural and beautiful visiting centers, museums and historical landmarks will not take a long time. This type of tourism, which does not need five-star hotels, can generate substantial income.

I believe that the long trenches of our front lines of Nakfa should be made destinations of national and international pilgrimage. Landmarks such as Nakfa, Faah, Ararb, and Himbol should be visited regularly to keep the history alive and generate income for the local communities. Mountains such as Denden, Debre Imen, Taba Freweini, and valleys and other places such Adi Shrum, Elaberied and many others are more than just mountains and valleys. They served as shields from bombs and bullets, shelters from heat and rain and ultimately key factors to the successes of the freedom fighters at the battlefields. Those caves and shades of trees were the freedom fighters’ schools, conference halls and homes where they ate, read, sang and danced. Most importantly, they are the last resting places of thousands of our freedom fighters. Soon, we should turn them to the best historical monuments in the country. They are and will be the best evidence of our history of sacrifices. These places are the museums of our history, to be visited by our children and future generations. They will be suitable for retreat, reflection and connection.

The time has now come when school buses can take children to visit our historical sites. School children can walk on the riverbed of the longest hospital in the world (Ararb) and visit Bliqat, where 2000 young female EPLF fighters in 1978 took a nine-month military training. Moving down from Bliqat to Mahmimet, they can visit the place where all the young men and women took political and military training, and Arag, the EPLF center for art and culture, where poems, songs and lyrics of success, loss, pain, hope, love, respect and unity were produced, and then staged at the front lines at night using generators and flickering torches.

Other places that are worth visiting include: the final grave yard of Wqaw, the desert hill of Awget and Grat; the graveyard of Nadow, Adi Shirum; Massawa and Assab (our Red Sea ports); the front lines of Gindae and Debub, where the last push was made to our freedom all the way to Asmara in 1991; and, of course, Sawa the riverbed with big trees and the sweetest drinking water, a refuge for our freedom fighters in the past and where Eritrea’s future is molded at present.

The unique history of Eritrean women’s participation in the armed struggle is hard to believe. Eritrean mothers fought on the side of their children so that they can be free from murder, torture, oppression, imprisonment and fear. Eritrean mothers were, and still are, defenders of our freedom, history and equality.

There is probably no more inspiring activity than visiting the gallery of the history of Eritrean women’s heroism at the National Union of Eritrean Women. The same can be achieved by visiting the hometowns or villages of Eritrean women leaders such as Adey Fana and Adey Zineb to connect to their spirits, the places where they lived in and made history.

Now is the time we do research and develop a strategy of how we share our history and our heritage. Eritrean and other African schools, colleges and universities could use the Eritrean history as a case study for gender issues and conflict resolution. If Eritrea is the best place to study ‘Conflict Resolution’ for the students of the University of George Mason in the USA, which sends its students to learn about the history of Eritrea, it should be an inspiration for African universities to send their students to experience Eritrea’s history.

The aim of my writing this article is to share and perhaps create some dialogue about our dream of a prosperous, green and developed Eritrea and how we can achieve those so that the generations after us can say something good about us. I am sure we are all looking to develop our nation without tipping the environmental, historical and cultural balance. Whether it is tourism or food processing, or other businesses, how do we create jobs and opportunities to the younger generations at home without spoiling their land and contaminating their drinking waters? We should take the right development path today so that they will be grateful to their ancestors for fighting and sacrificing their lives for freedom, for eliminating all kinds of colonization and leaving their environment safe.

So, what kind of development do we want to see and what kind of Eritrea do we wish to leave for the generations to come? Let us engage in meaningful and forward-looking discussions!

Source: Ministry of Information Eritrea

They were among the six youth finalists of the 2021 African World Heritage Day Competition in Eastern Africa. 200 competitors from 11 countries participated in the competition. And here is an interview with the youth engineers who represented Eritrea in the competition and managed to come out among the six finalists: Eng. Michael Berhe, Eng. Filmon Tesfamariam and Eng. Aman Desbele.

• Could you please give us an overview of the competition?

Well, the competition was carried out in accord with the World Heritage Day, May 5, where 13 East African countries were invited but 11 countries including Eritrea participated. It was organized by the UNESCO, intended for “Awareness raising and engagement of the youth in the protection and promotion of African World Heritage”. Our project was among the six proposals that qualified for the finalists of the competition from over 200 entries. The other wining groups are from Uganda, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Tanzania and Kenya.

• What was its objective?

Overall, the competition’s objective is to select shortlist of 6 project proposals and finance them for their implementation. Accordingly, our project proposal became among the selected projects according to the requirement and vote of the advisory panel of the UNESCO and advisory panel of the World Heritage Committee.

• What was your project about and how did you develop the idea?

We knew each other starting from College, and we had several finished projects together. Besides, we also shared different ideas and held thorough discussions on each of them. One of the ideas we shared was making a Mobile Tour App which visitors can use to get the needed information about Asmara, the capital of Eritrea; but for various reasons, we didn’t finalize it. It was in the middle of this that the chance to present our idea came up through the competition. We made some modifications to the original idea and submitted it to the competition, which we finally won.

• What inspired you to bring this idea?

It has been told in many occasions that Asmara has been added to the World Heritage List in 2016. Therefore, as it coincided with what we were already planning, we thought that we better focus on Asmara than taking other World Heritage sites in our region. According to the terms of the competition, our project intended to reach out to the society in general and the youth in particular through a mobile App in a user-friendly manner. So we hope that the App will be helpful in raising public knowledge about Asmara, in addition to boosting their awareness about World Heritage.

• Its practicability?

As we mentioned earlier, the project has been monitored by UNESCO and its partners. Accordingly, UNESCO has been facilitating the project and has a plan to carry out the project on the first half of November 2021.

• How will it be helpful?

It is designed to introduce visitors with the architectural beauty of Asmara which were listed by the UNESCO as a significant part of the world heritage. This includes; the essential facts, history and the current condition of the buildings or monuments in the capital. In addition, it will serve as an official app (Tour App) which gives visitors basic information.

• What could to be the upcoming challenges, and advantages of the project?

It is difficult to foresee the possible challenges at this point in time. May be, there could be some odds along the way including possible delays in the information gathering process. Other than that, we don’t expect any major challenge that could hold back our project. Speaking of the advantages, we consider this opportunity as a great advantage to introduce our city to the world. Besides, the idea of making this App came ahead of Asmara being added to the World Heritage List.

• Did you think you could win?

Obviously, wining is every participant’s dream. So we took part in the competition to win. But it is true that we had certain doubts because there were numerous competitors. But fortunately our dream came to reality.

• How was the winning moment?

When the UNESCO office in Eritrea called and told us about the news, we were very excited and it really was a very special moment for us. And also we were more invigorated after we checked it by ourselves on the UNESCO official website.

• Who will be your co-partners in the practical part?

Primarily, we have the UNESCO office in Asmara, and the Asmara Heritage Project (AHP). We also expect the Asmara Municipality Office, the Ministry of Tourism , Commission of Sports and Culture, along with other pertinent bodies to be on our side.

• Have you ever been a part of similar programs before, and your tip to the youth?

As we came to know later, there are many programs that focus on Eastern Africa, and this is just one of them. And that was our first experience to participate in a competition like this. But we didn’t have any idea about all this before. In fact, we learned about the competition when the National Union of Eritrean Youth and Students (NUEYS) released information about it. For sure, there is not enough information about such competitions, but the youth should look for information and be a part of both regional and international contests of a kind. In line with this, the national institutions have to provide grounds for the young generation to have a wider view.

• Do you have other projects you did together?

Yea, we have had some projects we share such as Kebhi, a website, Idu tube and several data bases for inventories and hotel managements.

• Your plans…?

First and foremost, we aspire to see the successful completion of what we have already started. And after this, we have plans to work on projects which we believe are useful to the community and the society at large.

• Is there anything else that you want to add at the end?

We want to thank the NUEYS, the UNESCO representative in Asmara, Mrs. Weyni Abay, and Mr. Mengs, whose advises we value a lot in the projects we work on. In addition, we want to extend our appreciation in advance to those who will work with us in the completion of our project.

Source: Ministry of Information Eritrea

The Ugandan government is known for cracking down on writers who express strong dissent to President Yoweri Museveni, who has ruled the African country for 35 years. Despite the risks, two writers recently composed deliberately provocative pieces criticizing the president.

Early this month, Ashaba Annah wrote an erotic poem on Facebook to Museveni, titled “I want to be Museveni’s side chic.”

The poem reads in part, “I want to be Museveni’s side chick so that when after reading a poem for him, I tell him that censorship, arrest, torture and imprisonment of writers is inhumane, cowardly an act and violation of rights.”

Speaking to VOA, Ashaba said she decided to write the poem after a long observation and listening to several of Museveni’s addresses. She said it was clear the government’s response to the concerns of citizens was relaxed.

“Someone needs to tell this person that we are tired,” she said. “First of all, the education crisis; schools are closed. Teachers are not working. I said, ‘If he asks me the kind of car I want, I will ask him to give me an ambulance, and I donate it to hospitals.'”

The Ugandan government has previously come down hard on writers who pen opinions on how the current regime is handling citizen’s concerns. This has included arrests, imprisonment and torture.

Twenty-three-year-old Ashaba did not face any of these, but she, too, caught the eye of the authorities and was summoned by the deputy director of the Internal Security Organization.

“He called and said, ‘I want to have a chat with you.’ I was scared. And he said, ‘We just want to have a chat.’ So, they asked me this one important question: ‘So, what do you want?’ And I gave them the answer, that as a writer, I’d gotten what I wanted — the fact that the message had reached the powers that be,” she said.

While officiating at the World Teachers Day, celebrated on October 12, Museveni, when asked by teachers to increase pay for all teachers, insisted only science teachers’ pay should be increased and not the pay of those teaching arts.

“Don’t mix up salary with authority,” Museveni said. “Saying that if the administrators get less pay than the scientists that it will spoil administration. I am the president of Uganda. If you want to check my power, you try it.”

‘Someone tell the life President to shut up’

Danson Kahyana, a senior lecturer at Makerere University, said he was angered by Museveni’s comments, and took to Facebook to express his disappointment. In a post titled “Someone tell the life President to shut up,” he says, “Someone tell the life-president that it is okay to have the parliament and the judiciary and the army and the police safely in his armpit; but there is a species of people, the arts scholars, who know how smelly every armpit gets.”

Kahyana said, “My Facebook post was a form of challenge to him to say, ‘Well, I think if you don’t have something to say about the arts and how important they are to the country, maybe you should just shut up and listen to people educate you about this. Being a president doesn’t mean that you know everything.'”

In a text message to VOA, government spokesperson Ofwono Opondo said these writers are seeking a moment in the spotlight. He said Museveni does not need to be insulted to be heard.

Source: Voice of America

When Ethiopian federal forces and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) started fighting in November 2020, a second front quickly opened online, where both sides seek to control the narrative.

Social media became a battleground, with the Ethiopian government and its supporters on one side and Tigrayan activists and supporters on the other. Each side tried to present its version of events to English-speaking audiences, according to The Media Manipulation Casebook. Created by the Shorenstein Center’s Technology and Social Change project at the Harvard Kennedy School, the Casebook group has been researching Tigray-related information campaigns since the conflict began.

The Tigrayan side focused largely on raising awareness of the conflict, while supporters of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s administration in Addis Ababa sought to disprove its opponent’s claims. And while both made misleading or sometimes false claims, the study found that official communications and pro-government users’ posts often sought to discredit any content contradicting the federal government’s narrative as disinformation.

“It is a complex case that interacts with the geopolitics of the Horn of Africa, historical trauma, activism, hate speech, misinformation, platform manipulation, and propaganda, all in the midst of an ongoing civil conflict,” according to research by The Media Manipulation Casebook.

At the start of the conflict, Tigrayan activists took to Twitter, and the nonprofit advocacy group Stand With Tigray soon emerged. At the same time, pro-government groups such as Ethiopia State of Emergency Fact Check tried to counter what they saw as TPLF disinformation, often seeking to discredit foreign and local coverage.

Operating exclusively on Twitter and Facebook, the group, which later rebranded as Ethiopia Current Issues Fact Check (ECIFC), stood out with official-sounding directives and statements that often condemned international coverage of the war.

Some analysts whom VOA spoke with believe the federal government launched the group. Authorities deny the claim, and government supporters see ECIFC as a necessary response to what they view as biased media coverage.

“Coverage had been hijacked by the operatives affiliated with the TPLF who are residing in different parts of the Western world,” Dina Mufti, a spokesperson for Ethiopia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told VOA. “And these operatives were actually the ones who are running these misinformation and disinformation campaigns. And they are not helping the international community to see the reality on the ground.”

Deacon Yoseph Tafari, chair of the Ethiopian American Civic Council, an association that describes itself as an advocate for human rights and the rule of law in Ethiopia, agreed.

“Something had to be done,” he told VOA, referring to what he sees as biased reporting. “Under these circumstances, the government has no other ways or tools at its disposal.”

Hiring the experts

The push to sway opinions online complemented more traditional efforts over the past year, as various parties engaged lobbyists to influence U.S. government policy and public opinion.

Among recent contracts, Ethiopia’s Ministry of Peace spent $270,000 for a six-month contract with the international public policy and law firm Holland & Knight, according to a foreign lobbying report.

The Colorado-based Ethiopian American Civic Council hired three public affairs professionals “to help push back against bipartisan criticism of the government’s response to violence in Tigray.”

And the Tigray Center for Information and Communication hired a Washington-based policy and advisory company, Von Batten-Montague-York, to press “for the removal of all Eritrean military personnel and militia from Tigray” and to ensure access to humanitarian aid delivery in Tigray, news website Politico reported. After the passage of a Senate bill, the firm stopped lobbying on the center’s behalf, according to reports.

The focus on influencing opinion extends to foreign media, with the Ethiopian federal government arguing that the TPLF is dominating or distorting international coverage.

But Ethiopian journalists and analysts say what the federal government considers disinformation is legitimate coverage critical of the government or sympathetic to the Tigrayan cause.

The Abiy administration was quick to throw its support behind the ECIFC’s calling out of what it sees as biased coverage. When ECIFC launched on social media, the prime minister’s spokesperson Billene Seyoum sent an email and a tweet directing media to the group’s social media accounts.”

Get the latest and fact-based information on the State of Emergency and Rule of Law Operations being undertaken in Tigray Region by the FDRE Federal Government,” Billene tweeted.

CIFC has charged that the media are being used to “peddle exaggerated and uncorroborated allegations,” giving space to “false allegations being lodged by TPLF operatives” and misrepresenting official statements.

The latter accusation, in a statement posted Aug. 11 on Twitter, cited reporting by U.S.-based outlets including Bloomberg and the The Washington Post.

“Most of the headlines and the content of the stories continue to deny through silence and turn a blind eye to the role a terrorist organization TPLF is playing in wreaking havoc in the stability of the country,” the statement read.

Local and foreign journalists who cover Ethiopia told VOA the statements show how deeply the Ethiopian government cares about the international coverage.

“It became a war about the narrative,” Addis Standard founder and Editor-in-Chief Tsedale Lemma told VOA. “They still are concerned about the narrative more than the actual effect of the war.”

Reports and statements by the United Nations and other international bodies also appear to support reporting that has been criticized by the government and ECIFC.

VOA made multiple interview requests to ECIFC through its social media pages but received no response.

On its Facebook page, ECFIC lists itself as a government website. But the same detail does not appear on Twitter. Scanning the group’s public information, VOA could not determine who works for the group or what its official mandate is.

Foreign Affairs spokesperson Dina told VOA that the fact check group is not affiliated with the government, however.

“The group is independent. They’re acting by themselves,” Dina said. “I know that they’re doing a fantastic job.”

“They give correct information — proper information — from Ethiopia,” he continued. “I’m not interested in commenting on that group.”

Disguised as a fact check

Some say ECIFC’s work illustrates a broader phenomenon in which a “fact check” itself disseminates disinformation.

Aly Verjee, a senior adviser with the United States Institute of Peace, said the group’s “co-opting of fact-checking language is very, very deliberate and very important.”

“There are people who aren’t going to trust anything that comes from a government spokesperson. But if they see ‘fact check’ associated with it, then maybe that brings an additional appearance of it being credible information,” Verjee said. “It potentially devalues the idea that there is objective reporting.”

Ethiopian journalist Tsedale said that despite the name, the group’s intention has always been clear: pushing the federal government narrative. “From the very beginning, it was not about fact-checking as it was about countering information that the government sees as not to its interests. It barely did any fact-checking.”

VOA did not identify any self-titled fact-checking accounts among those supporting the Tigrayan side.

Stand With Tigray is one of the most prominent pro-Tigrayan groups. It has more than 36,000 followers on Twitter and 14,478 followers on Facebook. The group runs Twitter campaigns calling on the international community to stop humanitarian crises, and it draws attention to what it sees as atrocities in the region.

CIFC, in comparison, has more than 84,000 followers on Twitter and 111,000 followers on Facebook.

The pro-government group appears to have a wide audience, said Claire Wilmot, who co-wrote The Media Manipulation Casebook report Dueling Information Campaigns: The War Over the Narrative in Tigray.

Wilmot said everyone is a target — especially foreign journalists and foreigners in general, as well as Ethiopians in Ethiopia and members of the diaspora.

“The fact check account draws its power from the preexisting narrative that the TPLF is financing a massive disinformation campaign online, which has not been substantiated by any evidence. It uses that disinformation narrative to undermine any and all critical reporting that shows the government in a negative light,” Wilmot told VOA.

“The impact that that will have on information health in Ethiopia, on the ability for independent journalists to challenge government narratives — that’s a big question.”

Source: Voice of America