MCT participates in Africa, China Solidarity forum on COVID -19

The Media Council of Tanzania has participated in an on-line forum organized by the All-China Journalists’ Association (ACJA) which brought together Chinese and African media professionals.

Apart from Tanzania other countries which participated in the forum held July 16, 2020 whose theme was “Solidarity against COVID 19 and China-Africa Community with a Shared Future are Nigeria, Kenya, Rwanda, Ivory Coast, and China.

Speaking during the forum, the Executive Secretary of the Media Council of Tanzania, Kajubi Mukajanga said the Media in Tanzania has been hit hard, and journalists are finding their work difficult and risky.

He said they are experiencing huge expectation and pressure from their communities and at the same time information is not readily available from authorities as it has been decreed in Tanzania that official information on COVID 19 would only be provided by the Prime Minister, Minister for Health and the Chief Government spokesperson.

Publishing any other information has landed many a journalist in trouble, Mukajanga said adding that reporters and media find themselves in a difficult situation.

He said initially briefings were given regularly on the state of the pandemic in the country after the first reported case on Mach 16 in the northern city of Arusha, known as a tourist hub and conference centre, with figures for the new infections, the dead and those who were cured provided to media.

However, as of April 29, 2020 the briefing stopped following doubts cast on the ability of the testing centres to correctly diagnose the disease after President John Magufuli castigated the national laboratory for positive results from samples which were non-human, Mukajanga said.

Soon after the announcement of the first sick person in the country on March 16, Mukajanga said, the Council compiled Guidelines on Safe and Ethical Reporting of COVID 19 and distributed them to the media.

Either he said there is a lot of suspect local, regional and international information from all sources adding that sifting through the COVID 19 “disinfodemic” has been a challenge to Tanzanian journalists as they seek to give context to their stories.

Many are not properly trained in debunking false information spread on- and offline Mukajanga said adding that the guidance given by MCT is helping, but a lot of work has to be done to ensure reporters do not end up as both victims and purveyors of disinformation.

He told participants of the forum the challenge they can discuss was fighting online disinformation laced with racist hate speech adding that our societies need to be made aware of the fallacy of these claims which seek to attribute the disease to “certain people”.

While our reporters and news outlets are burdened with the task of fact-checking and de-bunking a never-ending stream of false claims, he said communities need to be engaged so that such racist and xenophobic fallacy does not develop root.

He said  more discussions can be arranged online where we can share experiences and strategies citing the one held on  June 12, 2020  bringing together the media/press councils of Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Algeria, Zimbabwe, South Africa and Tanzania discussed media and COVID 19, among other topics.

“This present forum is an indication that we can do this more regularly and make sure our media organisations are not only staying safe, but also covering this pandemic effectively”, he insisted.

On steps taken by the Council since the first reported case of the pandemic in Tanzania in March, Mukajanga told the forum Staff of the Council was taken though rapid training on staying safe and the way the Council runs its programs was changed to ensure safety of both staff members and our clients, Mukajanga told the online forum.

“We stopped all programs which needed people to come together in large groups.  We started using an online approach in implementing projects. We also started working from home and made sure there were gloves, masks and hand sanitizer for those who would be forced to occasionally come to office.  When such a situation arose, we observed strict social distancing and did not allow more than six people in a room that previously held twenty people”, the MCT Executive Secretary said.

The novel coronavirus was reported to have started sometime in December 2019, and the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic on March 11, 2020.