The succession of international commemorations relating to, or about access to information in the past few months may be coincidental, but it injected the much needed momentum. It underscored the important role timely and relevant information plays in our lives, and the role of the media in its delivery. This becomes apparent with a casual look at the list of the recent commemorations, the essence being the impact correct information or lack of it is likely to have on human welfare. The International Day for the Universal Access to Information observed every September 28th speaks for itself in its self-referenced title. It is as much as about free flow of accurate and reliable information as it is about protection of fundamental freedoms. In the same vein, the World Development Information Day commemorated on October 24th aims to draw attention around the world about development problems while addressing the need to strengthen international cooperation to solve them. And, last week, the 10th Africa Information Day marked in Kigali looked at pressing issues in the media and the need to support its role in a continent on the march to sustained development. Similarly, followers of the various BBC platforms – online, radio, TV – will also not have failed to notice how it dedicated the whole of this week to the in-depth analyses of the various facets of the fake-news phenomenon in Africa and around the world. The dedication to one subject for such a global media organisation for a whole week was bound raise to some attention. It illuminated on the contradictions at the stage we have reached in the information age. Among some of my favourite highlights was by contributors the calibre of the insightful veteran journalist, Charles Onyango-Obbo. In a discussion in one of the introductory radio programmes on the issue, he reminded us how fake-news despite its negative connotation sometimes has had a revolutionary angle in Africa, and how it has been the weapon of the weak against the strong throughout history. Observe the various liberation struggles during the colonial and post-colonial times in the continent. But fake-news has definitely had a negative impact. Yet it has not always been appreciated how it has impacted in the development sector. Certainly, the now pervasive negative impact cannot be what the UN General Assembly had in mind during its adoption of the December 2010 resolution on information and communications technologies (ICT). It lauded the ICT as having “the potential to provide new solutions to development challenges, particularly in the context of globalisation, and [how they] can foster economic growth, competitiveness, access to information and knowledge, poverty eradication and social inclusion.” However, by 2013, the World Economic Forum was raising the red flag about how hyperconnectivity could enable “digital wildfires” to wreak havoc in the real world. The digital wildfires are the same affliction that today we are referring to in the scourge of fake-news. Before we come to how it is impacting the development sector, recall that while propaganda and all manner of misinformation and disinformation have been with us through time, it is now an established fact that 2016 gave the term fake-news shape and a concrete place in time. It will be recalled how it was the year that heralded the “post-truth” era in the aftermath of the Trump election in the US and his assault on the media as peddlers of fake-news. Since then, a February 2018 sector analysis by the British non-profit International Broadcasting Trust shows how the term has leapt from merely being a devious political ruse to being a fatal tool in unscrupulous hands targeting NGO development efforts. The report highlights the experience of the charities such as Save the Children, whose search and rescue work in the Mediterranean during the “migration crisis” was jeopardized by false allegations that the NGO was colluding with people traffickers. The charity’s director of media is quoted explaining how a single fabricated report online led to repeated attempts to disrupt the organisation’s work, and the misinformation nearly succeeded. Perhaps more illustratively, along with mention of how misinformation hampered vaccination campaigns in some parts of the world, is a narration by the president and chief executive officer of Internews, Jeanne Bourgault, showing the deadly form fake-news had taken incarnating as a rumour feeding the Mediterranean Sea crossings: The rumour perpetrated by human traffickers “was a weird one,” she explains in an interview on the online development platform, Devex, “that you had to puncture your boat right before you got to shore or else they wouldn’t let you ashore. [...] People were dying because of this. They were not making it to shore, because they thought that if they just punctured their boat then they would be saved and be allowed to stay in Greece.” Such revelations offered much needed impetus to urgently do something about it. And, as the International Broadcasting Trust report argues, for this reason we should back calls to improve “media literacy” in countering fake-news pedlars and conspiracy theorists. Twitter: @gituram The views expressed in this article are of the author.
