Last year was not a good year for journalists across the world — including African journalists and especially those based in East and Horn of Africa.

When it comes to jailing and killing scribes, the region is the ignominious leader for sub-Saharan Africa.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), which monitors the press across the globe, found a spike in journalist murders last year — the second highest rate ever recorded by the organisation since we started monitoring in 1992.

70 journalists were killed around the world in 2012, with the worst year on record being 2009, when 74 individuals were confirmed dead — nearly half of them slain in a massacre in Maguindanao province in the Philippines.

ALSO READ: OBBO: 2012 was not a good year; they killed 127 of us

The spike in killings globally was largely due to internal conflicts where almost all casualties were local rather than foreign journalists —  94 per cent of all cases, according to CPJ figures.

TV reporters were targeted the most, followed closely by online reporters. The type of medium in these attacks is telling. In the past, it was the plucky print reporter whose hard-hitting investigative story may have enraged a local official to the point of permanently silencing the reporter.

These days, journalists are silenced simply for being journalists, regardless of the content produced.

A large “press” sign emblazoned across one’s chest or a TV camera no longer works to dissuade attacks; it encourages them. In fact, nearly half (46 per cent) of journalist deaths were directly targeted attacks as opposed to crossfire casualties in 2012, according to CPJ research.

But why has this change in attitude towards the press occurred?

Controlling the message has always been a strategic military tactic — radio stations were routinely commandeered in the flurry of coup plots that plagued sub-Saharan Africa in the past.

The difference today is the fact that controlling information is more challenging with the influx of independent broadcasters, publishers and websites.

Old forms of censorship no longer work.” Instead, authorities, militias, gang members, among others, are resorting to silencing the messenger as a desperate measure to control information where a chorus of voices exist.

Take Syria, where the highest reported number of journalist casualties occurred last year, with 28 deaths.

With international journalists blocked and tradition domestic media under state control, citizen journalists picked up cameras and mobile phones to document the conflict — and at least 13 of them paid the ultimate price.

One, Anas al-Tarsha, was only 17 years old. “This feels like the first YouTube war,” said veteran BBC Middle East correspondent Paul Wood. “There’s someone with a machine gun and two people next to him with camera phones.”

The restive Middle East region was by far the deadliest in 2012, with 40 documented journalist deaths.

But sub-Saharan Africa, a region that previously had few reported murders, shared the discomfiting “second place” with Asia for most journalists killed, with at least 14 deaths documented last year.

Perhaps most disturbing, all but one of Africa’s 14 cases occurred in the East and Horn African region.

With the exception of Nigerian cameraman and reporter Enenche Akogwu of Channels TV, who was shot by unknown gunmen while reporting on terrorist activities of the extremist Islamic group Boko Haram in the northern town of Kano, all of Africa’s cases occurred around here.

Somalia had the deadliest year ever recorded by CPJ with 12 journalists killed in direct relation to their work.

The killings in Somalia reflect the global trend: more and more journalists, often broadcast reporters who contribute to online news sites, are targeted simply for being part of the profession.

The casualties are getting younger and younger. Out of the 12 confirmed killed, three quarters were under the age of 30.

“In Somalia, everyone over 30 fled the country,” explains Sahal Abdulle, an exiled veteran Somali journalist and former correspondent for The New York Times and Reuters.

Nearly all the journalists killed worked for broadcasters and contributed to news websites and, most disturbingly, all were directly targeted killings.

Lack of prosecution

Somalia’s high death toll was due in part to sensitive elections held in August and in part to Al Shabaab insurgents, who were ousted from the capital, Mogadishu, in 2011, according to Mohamed Odowa, deputy director of the independent station Radio Kulmiye.

“Al Shabaab was losing ground and it was forced from large areas, so the group wanted to send a message to the outside world that they were still in the capital,” Odowa said.

Even worse, any assailant of Somali journalists knows there will be no repercussions. Not a single journalist murder has been prosecuted in Somalia over the past decade, CPJ research shows.

On Friday, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Somalia, Dr Augustine P. Mahiga condemned the murder of Shabelle radio journalist Abdihared Osman Adan. The journalist was shot dead by unidentified gunmen earlier on Friday in Mogadishu.

Local journalists say this perfect record of impunity can be attributed to corrupt and weak institutions, a situation that encourages more killing.

Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud announced a task force would be set up in late November last year to investigate cases involving killing of journalists but nothing has been set up to date.

Meanwhile, film and photographic evidence implicated the Tanzanian police in the killing of Channel Ten reporter Daudi Mwangosi in September 2012.

Police attacked Mr Mwangosi after he confronted them about the assault of another journalist, according to new reports.

The two reporters had been covering a demonstration organised by an opposition party in the southern Tanzanian city of Iringa.

Authorities eventually arrested and charged one police constable, 23 year-old Cleophase Pasifious, according to news reports.
In Kenya, CPJ presented evidence implicating the police in the brutal 2009 murder of Weekly Citizen journalist Francis Nyaruri.

But the murder trial continues to drag on with no police presented in court despite a directive from a former Attorney General to investigate the involvement of a certain police chief.

Journalists are increasingly considered legitimate targets by warlords and corrupt government officials.