Ethiopia cut internet access in late June following what the government said was a national security measure. The assassination of a prominent musician, Hachalu Hundessa in the capital sparked off a series of violent incidents that led to massive loss of lives and property.
The move was just the latest leg of government’s resort to cutting connection in the face of security related crisis. The official position of government has routinely been dismissed as doing little to cure the malady it sets out to deal with.
A series of condemnations trailed the outage which lasted over 20 days, one of the longest nationwide outages in recent years. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights’ spokesperson in a July 3 statement called for restoration of connectivity.
“The shutting down of Internet services is of particular concern as it disproportionately restricts the enjoyment of the right to freedom of expression, including freedom to seek, receive and impart information and risks further exacerbating tensions.
“We urge the authorities to restore Internet access without further delay,” the statement by Rupert Colville read in part. It took another 11 days for Addis Ababa to partially restore connection before eventually full connectivity returned on July 23.
Two professionals share perspectives: Journalist, data analyst
Beyond the human and press rights angle and the calls for restoration, the ongoing global health context with COVID-19 also came up strongly. Over the period of the blackout, daily release of official virus statistics ceased.
Africanews spoke to two professionals on the impact that the outage had on their work. Zecharias Zelalem, is a journalist who writes for among others the local Addis Standard and South Africa’s The Mail and Guardian.
Whiles sharing perspectives with us on the impact of COVID-19 reportage was Harun Asefa, a data analyst who run an interactive situation dashboard dedicated to Ethiopia’s virus statistics.
A journalist’s assessment of the internet shutdown route
For Zelalem, the narrative that outages cured incidents of violence was one again defeated. “the shutdown did almost little to quell violence, as hundreds have lost their lives,” he said in an email exchange.
Despite being out of the jurisdiction when the outage was imposed, he stressed a clear impact on his job as a journalist. “... it made it considerably difficult to communicate with people on the ground.
“Encrypted applications like Telegram and Signal are often used by journalists and fixers on the ground to pass information or images to colleagues elsewhere. During the shutdown, only telephone service was available.
“Ethiopia still has only one state run telecommunications provider, meaning that telephone calls can be routinely monitored and tapped. A number of journalists have been arrested in the past two weeks, meaning there was an increased risk faced by those seeking to cover the violence.
Individuals were understandably more hesitant to communicate over open state monit
