A Twitter account shared a post on Aug 20, 2022, Captioned “The United Nations and other organizations should reach out to the Oromo people suffering from Hunger.”
By the time this article is published the post had more than 13 retweets including a Twitter account with more than 15 thousand followers retweeting the post.
However, HaqCheck inspected the image and rendered the post, Partly-False.
According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA’s) Report rainfall deficits during the recent March-April-May 2022 rainy season have been the most severe in at least the last 70 years in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia. The ongoing, four-season drought has been the most extensive and persistent event since 1981.
The report by The Africa Watch which is now part of (the Human Rights Watch) shows that many historic famines were the result of the way civil wars were waged. Sometimes, food stores were seized to feed huge armies of tens of thousands of soldiers. In other cases, cattle and crops were confiscated as a military strategy. These measures degraded communities, making them vulnerable when drought struck.
The claim is thus produced in the context of the current drought situation in the region.
HaqCheck used a Google reverse image search to prove the correctness of the images used by the Twitter account to support the claim.
One of the images is found shared on different Social media platforms to show the drought in the Oromia West Guji zone.
The other image was posted on May 19, 2022, on a Facebook page with more than 57thousand followers. The post claimed the image is from Mekele, Tigray.
The third image was also shared on different Social media and websites in different descriptions at different times.
On Apr 4,2017, a Website shared this image on an article wriiten about the Somalian parliament approving the state budget.
One of the Facebook post uses the image to show the poverty in Nigeria posted on World poverty day on On Oct 18 2018.
The Fourth image was taken by a South African photojournalist in which he wins the Pulitzer award. The photo shows a starving child who collapsed on the ground and was struggling to get to a food center in Sudan in 1993.
Even though there are several claims that there is starvation caused by drought in Ethiopia, among the four images used by the Twitter account, three of them don’t show the hunger caused by drought in Ethiopia [Oromia].
Therefore, HaqCheck inspected the post and rendered it Partly-False.
