La pauvre Burundi, the neglected child of the family

If you read the Kenyan, Tanzanian, and Ugandan press frequently, you will encounter more stories on South Sudan, Somalia, and Ethiopia than on Burundi.

This seems strange, considering that Burundi is a member of the East African Community and South Sudan, Somalia, and Ethiopia are not.

Even stranger, is that Burundi sent its troops to join the African Union’s peacekeeping force in Somalia, Amisom, nearly four years ago, but the country it went to save gets more media play.

The people of Burundi feel this neglect, and they are not happy about it at all, as several Burundians’ e-mails and posts on my Twitter page remind me weekly.

Part of the problem is that the EAC is an English and Kiswahili speaking community. Burundi speaks some Kiswahili, but too much French and hardly any English.

On that account alone, South Sudan and Ethiopia will get more media play in the region’s English language press and TV.

Then Burundi’s avocado-loving President Pierre Nkurunziza, who also happens to be East Africa’s most prayerful leader, is not media savvy.

Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni and Rwanda’s Paul Kagame, for example, have been hanging out together quite a lot these past months.

In a famous photo, they were caught holding herdsmen’s staffs and tending cattle on Kagame’s farm outside Kagame. Then they gave each other cows. Journalists love such stuff.

Of course, there is the other extreme — the one refined by Kenya’s President Mwai Kibaki. Kibaki has a monarch’s aloofness from the media, and keeps out of the public eye a lot. He thus creates a great media demand for him by his well-managed scarcity.

First Ladies are also an asset that Pierre is not exploiting. The First Lady does necessarily have to be pretty, all she needs is character.

She doesn’t have to be young, either. Though both are good-looking, the age difference between First Lady Janet Museveni and Jeannette Kagame is over 10 years. But they both radiate something that has helped their husband’s images.

Burundi’s First Lady Denise Nkurunziza is cut in the mould of Janet Museveni. However, the president hardly deploys her much outside Burundi for image building. 

The two biggest problems though remain language, and information. Burundians are notorious for not replying to e-mails and not returning calls from other East Africans. The English-French thing again.

The bigger one though is that Burundi is almost an Internet black spot. There is remarkably little information about the country online. A year ago, we set out to find demographic and heavy survey (DHS) data for the EAC countries.

Within two days, we had it dating back four years for all the other four EAC countries, except Burundi. A year later, we still don’t have it.

If there is one thing that the EAC Secretariat and Burundi’s donor friends can do to reduce the country’s obscurity in the media, it is to it flood the Internet with data, photos, and video. And, of course, it would help if a lot of it were in English.

Otherwise, Burundi is not East Africa’s sick man. It is the region’s neglected and ignored child.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is Nation Media Group’s executive editor for Africa & Digital Media. E-mail: [email protected]. Twitter: @cobbo3