Daniel Howden, or @Howden_Africa, is a Nairobi-based correspondent for the Economist magazine to which I am a subscriber — although perhaps for not much longer.
It would overstating the case to say I follow Howden’s career or writing with any great interest, but I have noted over the past two years that he has not composed a single word about the Eastern DRC in particular that could not have been written by a semi-literate sixteen year old with an Internet connection. For all the original reporting he has undertaken on the subject (zero), Howden could just as well be in Nagoya or Nebraska as Nairobi. His editors seems to be under the mistaken impression that Howden’s relative geographical proximity to events in the DRC endows him with special insights. It most decidedly does not.
Now this is all a bit nasty, I hear you saying. Sonia, why do you have to get so personal with these struggling foreign correspondents toiling away in a dying industry for pennies a word? Can’t you cut them some slack if they treat their work the way their bosses treat them, i.e. disdainfully?
As a matter of fact, I feel great sympathy for the foreign correspondents of the world, especially those on this continent. It was once a sweet gig. Your job made you seem fearless and sexy. Women wanted you; men wanted to be like you. More importantly, your editors, who provided you with generous expense accounts, were clueless about the subjects you wrote about, and the people whom you wrote about never read it. Even if they did, they had no means by which to hold you to account. You lived in a world of complete professional impunity. You could extemporise to your heart’s content, and the only people capable of challenging your slapdash account of things were fellow hacks whose interests aligned with yours in never giving the game up. What a glorious scam.
But, alas, no longer. For one thing, declining newsroom budgets and all but non-existent expense accounts make foreign bureaus, depleting in number anyway, unappealing to senior journalists. The jobbing hacks who fill the void are low-paid stringers, often in their late teens, chronically dependent on a constant flow of media releases from UN agencies and NGOs to to fill the chasm-like gaps in their knowledge and understanding — gaps for which they often overcompensate by including the word “Africa” in their Twitter handle.
Which brings me to @Howden_Africa, and his latest effort in the Economist. This is what he writes about the latest developments in the Eastern DRC:
The M23 leaders have little incentive to cut a deal in talks which have dragged on in neighbouring Uganda. Their rank and file may be reintegrated into the army but Mr Makenga and others face possible war-crimes charges. Rwanda, for its part, has sounded as bellicose as ever. Its ambassador to the UN has been complaining of stray shells landing within its borders and has warned that its forces could yet invade its larger neighbour, as it has done before.
“Unless Rwanda gets on board with a definitive peace process, we’ll be back here in a year’s time,” says Michael Deibert, author of a recent book entitled “Congo: Between Hope and Despair”.
Now, it’s possible that @Howden_Africa does not know that Rwanda’s UN Ambassador Gasana, far from “complaining of stray shells”, was reacting to the deaths of a 13-year-old and 45-year-old as the result of mortar fire into Rwanda from the DRC.
But assuming even a journalist as lazy as he would know at least that much, three questions for @Howden_Africa:
Is it “bellicose” for a country to threaten to strike back when a neighboring country fires across the border and kills your citizens? Especially when there have been dozens of previous cases, including the recent death of an infant?
Can he name a single country — and I include Bhutan — that would not stand up for its territorial integrity in precisely the same way?
Was the death of two people from these “stray shells” not a significant enough fact to include in your reporting?
I will pose these questions to him on Twitter and we’ll see if he deigns to respond (he won’t).
What is perhaps most remarkable about this silly little article is @Howden_Africa‘s use of Michael Deibert, some kind of supposedly credible source on the Great Lakes region. For those of you who don’t know (which will be the vast, fortunate majority of you), Deibert is a full-time Rwanda-hating troll. His self-published [CORRECTION: It is published by the blog African Arguments] book — which not a single person I know has even heard of, let alone read — bears the endorsement of a veritable who’s who of RPF hating elite: Howard French (who has never set foot in Rwanda), swivel-eyed Congolese activist Kambale, and self-styled guru George Ayittey of Ghana who has literally made a career from defaming Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame, recently calling him a communist dictator (!).
Now, no one, least of all me, is claiming that objectivity is a prerequisite to having a voice in these matters, and if I were to be quoted by @Howden_Africa or any of the other @____Africas, I would fully expect to be described (accurately) as a supporter of the Government of Rwanda or, alternatively, critic of MONUSCO, etc. The same should surely be the case here. Misrepresenting Deibert as an authority on the Great Lakes without declaring his open and relentless antipathy to Rwanda is just plain old unethical journalism.
