By Kemo Cham
Recently the Sierra Leone government was forced to issue a statement debunking a fake news in circulation.
Someone had modified the mobile app used by the Ministry of Information and Communication to announce update in the national Covid-19 response; they added two to the official number of confirmed cases, dubiously making it look like the country had eight cases. It sparked a debate on social media among Sierra Leoneans, about the correct statistics.
That, according to Emmanuel Turay, Acting Director of Information, was an illustration of the problem the government have been struggling to deal with in the response effort to the ongoing viral pandemic.
“We are not just fighting a pandemic, we are also fighting an infordemic,” Turay said at the opening session of a three-day training on risk communication.
“At this time everybody is writing everything about Covid-19. We are always on TV debunking [conspiracy] theories and disinformation. There is need to address this,” he added, justifying the need for the training.
The participants were mainly journalists, drawn from across the country. They also included communications officers working with institutions involved in the national One Health platform.
A handful of examples of how misinformation and fake news was derailing the national Covid-19 response effort were shared in the course of the two-day sessions. In one notable instance, the result of the fake news got deadly. A lady who had been told about an unannounced school vaccination rushed to collect her child from school. She was reportedly refused to take the child. On returning home, the woman who had a heart problem, collapsed and died.
Even the emergency free toll line – 117 – which the government urges the public to call and report any suspected case of the virus and other health related issues, hasn’t been spared. Unscrupulous people make repeated hoax calls to the operators.
Harold Thomas, Communications Lead at the Directorate of Health Security in the Ministry of Health and Sanitation, said this has made the response effort difficult because the operators find it hard to tell which case to respond to.
Thomas, who is also the Acting Programme Manager of the Health Education Unit in the ministry, led the process of development of a risk communication strategy for the country’s Covid-19 response. He said while the goal is to provide timely information to the public, this has to be done so that the information is credible.
“Risk communication is a technical area, like all other technical areas, like laboratory technicians. You don’t just take a microphone and go to the street asking people to do something. You have to have a theoretical framework,” he stated during a presentation on the plan to the participants.
Thomas said their goal is to be the first to tell the people what they should know, to preempt those seeking to confuse the public with fake news. And he believes they have been doing just that.
But from an outsider’s point of view, this is hardly the case.
Not only is information not coming in early enough, the struggle to fill in the gap has occasioned a competition between the mainstream media and citizen journalists, the latter being the most likely conveyor of fake news.
A lot of information is requested by the public which the government think they don’t require. And these are some of the information the fake news peddlers try to provide, like who has tested positive? Where they are? How did they get infected?
The most contentious issue has been the demand for the disclosure of the identity of people infected with the virus.
About three weeks ago, the umbrella body representing medical students wrote a letter to the administration of the College of Medicine and Allied Health Sciences (COMAHS) demanding action in relation to one of the confirmed cases who had reportedly had contacts with a large number of medical students.
Not only was the letter leaked, those who did it modified its content and added the name of the case.
Thomas said incidents like that show that some people go through the “back door” to get classified information, which they then doctor to suit their purpose. He insisted that information like that some people are asking for they can’t provide.
“We give out only information the public needs to know. The number of confirmed cases, the number of people in quarantine…. These are the things that we give, beyond that we will not,” he said.
“Not because we don’t want to give, but because it is against ethical principles. What we need to do is to go according to international standards,” he stressed.
The training on risk communication is one of many attempts by the government and its development partners at resolving this problem of fake news. This session, which was held in the eastern Kenema District, was organized by the German international development agency, GIZ, with financial and technical support from the European Union and the German government through its Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development, otherwise known as BMZ.
Dr Amadou Traore, Technical Adviser at GIZ, championed the training as part of its Regional Support to Pandemic Prevention Program (RPPP) in the ECOWAS region. He said the fight against Covid-19 was a shared responsibility, for which journalists were key partners to the government.
The RPPP program focuses on 4 intervention areas, including communication on health risks and gender sensitivity, within the one-health framework and Interinstitutional Communication and coordination between the ECOWAS Commission, specialized institutions and bodies and Member States in the fight against epidemics.
The Covid-19 pandemic, which started in China late last year, has since affected well over 200 countries globally, according to figures from the World Health Organization (WHO).
Globally there were 2, 241, 778 confirmed cases of the virus and 152, 551 fatalities, as of Monday, April 20, 2020.
The pandemic came to Africa late, but it has been growing at a rapid rate. With 43 cumulative confirmed cases, as of April 20, Sierra Leone has one of lowest number of cases in West Africa. But, with over 500 people in quarantine, and surrounded by neighbors – Liberia and Guinea – where cases are multiplying by the day, Sierra Leone is still far from getting out of the woods.
Besides loss of lives, the pandemic has also had a devastating effect on economies, with serious consequences on individual livelihoods.
“In such a context, Risk Communication is proven to play an important role in fostering community engagement and mobilization toward healthy behavioural, and risk minimizing choices that will save lives,” said Dr Traore in a presentation in the conference hall of Paloma Guest House in Kenema.
“Within the One Health Concept, journalists are better allies of government in furthering Risk Communication activities. Hence the support of GIZ to this current training activity,” he added.
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