ABSTRACT
This is the first national and multilingual survey of Ethiopian journalists, resulting in, first, a comprehensive demographic profile of Ethiopian journalists; second, the overwhelming evidence of antipathy between government-employed and private-sector journalists that undermines the possibility of a collective identity or cooperative relations among Ethiopian journalists; third, the discovery of an apparent paradox between Ethiopian journalists’ pride in their country’s history as a sovereign nation and their regret at the lack of strong press traditions which is a by-product of this history and, finally, the tension that emerges in the data between Ethiopian journalists’ pride in and embarrassment about their chosen profession.
INTRODUCTION
Ethiopia is an ancient country that shows many faces to the world. It is respected variously as the cradle of humanity (homo sapiens), the birthplace of one of the world’s oldest but now defunct forms of democratic governance (the Oromo Geda System), the stronghold of African independence, and the homeland of the world’s most outstanding long-distance runners. At the same time, it attracts much more international media coverage as the land of famine, hunger, poverty, civil war, and autocratic governments.
Politically, modern Ethiopia has known three different types of governments: the imperial rule of Emperor Hailesilassie (r. 1930-1974; except for the Italian East Africa interregnum from 1936 to 1941), the Marxist military junta led by President Mengistu Hailemariam (r. 1974-1991), and the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front’s (EPRDF’s) revolutionary democratic government, led by Prime Minister Meles Zenawi (r. 1991-2012), one of Africa’s longest serving leaders, who died in office in August 2012, and was replaced by Prime Minister Hailemariam Dessalegn.
In 2012, the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia (FDRE) had an estimated population of 92 million, making it the second most populous nation in Africa. The country is landlocked, has a predominantly agrarian economy, and regularly suffers extreme weather events such as drought and famine. The country depends on significant amounts of humanitarian and development aid from Western countries to alleviate its economic problems and food shortages. In the last decade alone, US$26 billion in aid was donated, primarily from the European Community, United States of America, and United Kingdom (Dereje, 2011).
The official language is Amharic. It is spoken by only 32.7% of the population, with another 31.9% speaking Afan Oromo, the language of the largest ethnic community of the country. In terms of religion, some 43.5% of the population are followers of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahido Church, another 33.9% identify as Muslims and there are smaller Protestant and Catholic congregations as well as followers of traditional beliefs (Central Statistical Agency [CSA], 2008).
Ethiopia has very limited media and communication resources. According to a recent Ethiopian Broadcast Authority report, by 2013, there were only 16 newspaper titles and 25 magazines available in the market (Ethiopian Broadcasting Authority [EBA], 2013). The country’s Telecom and Broadcast industry is under government monopoly. There are an estimated 1,400 professional journalists in the country or one journalist for every 65,000 Ethiopians. This number does not include around 200 EPRDF cadres that staff the party-owned media. The EPRDF government tightly controls both the state-run media organizations and the commercial press. These adverse conditions have dampened the professional ambitions of many dedicated and courageous Ethiopian journalists. It is a grim fact that those who take their work seriously live with the constant threat of prosecution, imprisonment, or exile. In a recent survey, Ethiopia is named among the countries most likely to imprison journalists or to force them into exile (Committee to Protect Journalists, 2011a, 2011b; Human Rights Watch, 2010; Witchel, 2011).
Thus, despite creating a constitutional and legal framework to protect press freedom and independent journalism in the 1990s as part of the post-junta democratization process, the Meles government then proved more than willing to contravene its own media rules and stifle media commercialization in the 2000s to ensure its own political survival. The recently appointed Prime Minister Hailemariam Dessalegn seems set to follow the same path as his predecessor (“Ethiopia’s Hailemariam,” 2012).
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