As news events go, a conference about East African infrastructure bonds is certainly one for the specialist reporters. But when the keynote speaker is Kenya’s President Mwai Kibaki and he is within 50 metres of a room-full of journalists on the first day of their Thomson Reuters Foundation training course, wouldn’t it be perverse to ignore him?
Well, that’s the way trainers Tim Large and Nick Kotch felt when they heard about the coincidence and decided that an unexpected assignment to cover Kibaki was as good a way as any to start the week-long workshop on “Reporting Crises and Disasters”.
The 12 participants from five African countries came prepared to report simulated wars, floods and earthquakes, not how to raise capital to improve ports and roads. But journalism is what happens when you are busy making other plans, to paraphrase John Lennon, and their stories about the speech became a real-life exercise to produce fast and accurate copy with zero preparation.
And after all, Kenya’s own conflict explains why foreign and local investors will have to be sweet-talked before they buy into an infrastructure bond. The country’s reputation was shattered by post-election violence in early 2008 between Kibaki’s supporters and those of his rival, Raila Odinga, that left at least 1,300 people dead.
For the rest of the week we steered a more predictable course during the Foundation’s second “Disasters” workshop, a year after the inaugural one in Beijing. The core purpose of the training is to strengthen coverage of the big, ugly stories that break out of nowhere, sowing natural or man-made mayhem and catching newsrooms off-guard.
Sadly, predictions that African conflicts and other avoidable disasters are winding down have started to look very wide of the mark.
With full-scale fighting in the eastern regions of the Democratic Republic of Congo, as well as in Somalia and in Darfur, not to mention a looming food crisis in Ethiopia, it is a safe bet that Nairobi will remain the hub of Africa’s humanitarian aid industry for many years to come.
Guest speakers who came to the Kenya School of Monetary Studies, the course venue, briefed participants on all of these crises. Marcus Prior of the UN’s World Food Programme and John Hayward and Daniel Dickinson of the European Commission’s Humanitarian Aid Office (ECHO), took things one step further and simulated news conferences that were strong material for oral and written exercises.
“The knowledge I personally acquired has undoubtedly shaped my way of dealing with news,” said Joseph Akwiri, one of two participants from Kenya’s Mombasa-based Baraka FM.
Prior, a WFP spokesman, talked about the heavy toll Somalia is taking in the ranks of aid agencies.
“We at WFP have lost two staff killed this year, both when they were off-duty. We don’t know if they were targeted but 29 aid workers have been killed in Somalia so far in 2008,” he said.
The Reuters bureau, which has vast collective experience covering disasters and crises for real, gave the course its full support with bureau chief Andy Cawthorne, chief photographer Radu Sigheti and senior RTV producer Patrick Muiruri all taking the time to share their experiences, in words, video and photos.
The bureau in downtown Nairobi also hosted a panel discussion on the topic “Can journalists and aid workers trust each other” with panellists from Care International, the Kenya Red Cross, Voice of America and an invited audience.
As if to underline how close the course came to reality, several participants took up Cawthorne’s invitation to accompany him to a news conference by U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Jendayi Frazier about the upsurge of fighting in eastern DRC.
Nick Kotch, Johannesburg, November 17, 2008
The "Reporting Crises and Disasters" workshop was held at the Kenya School of Monetary Studies in Nairobi, October 27-31, 2008.
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