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Africa: Media Matters
AfricaFocus Bulletin
Oct 3, 2010 (101003)
(Reposted from sources cited below)
Editor's Note
"Weak though they may often be, the media, especially the
independent outlets, have made remarkable contributions to peaceful
and transparent elections in Benin, Cape Verde, Ghana, Mali,
Namibia, South Africa and Zambia; to post-conflict transitions and
the restoration of peace in Liberia, Mozambique and Sierra Leone;
and to sustaining constitutional rule in times of political crises
in Guinea, Kenya and Nigeria. And many continue to push to open up
the space for freedom in suffocating environments." - Kwame
Karikari, Media Foundation for West Africa
In the latest issue of Africa Renewal
(http://www.un.org/ecosocdev/geninfo/afrec/), veteran Ghanaian
journalist Kwame Karikari surveys the strengths and weaknesses of
African media, faced with constraints both from government
repression and from economic weaknesses. Despite the obstacles,
however, including imprisonment of journalists in Eritrea, killings
of journalists in Somalia, and similar offenses in a a number of
other countries, newspapers, radio, and other media, now
prominently including on-line media, are a vibrant sector in almost
every African country.
This AfricaFocus Bulletin contains Dr. Karikari's article, a short
commentary by journalist Thapelo Ndlovu of the Media Institute of
Southern Africa, and a press release from the World Association of
Newspapers and News Publishers on the campaign for the Declaration
of Table Mountain, calling for the repeal of insult and defamation
laws, which are often used against the press.
Another AfricaFocus Bulletin released today, available on the web
at http://www.africafocus.org/docs10/med1010b.php, but not sent out
by e-mail, contains several commentaries on debates on proposed new
laws threatening freedom of information in South Africa.
Regular reports on the situation of journalists under threat in
specific countries are available on the web and by e-mail from a
number of international organizations.
These include:
(1) Reporters without Borders
http://en.rsf.org/afrique.html
http://fr.rsf.org/afrique,230.html
(2) Committee to Protect Journalists
http://www.cpj.org/africa
(3) International Freedom of Expression eXchange
http://ifex.org/africa/all/
(4) Media Foundation for West Africa
http://www.mediafound.org
(5) Media Institute of Southern Africa
http://www.misa.org
(6) AllAfrica.com Press and Media News
http://allafrica.com/media/
[Note: If you know of other key organizations with websites that
should be added to this list, please send the URL to
[email protected]]
For previous AfricaFocus Bulletins on culture and the media, visit
http://www.africafocus.org/cultexp.php
++++++++++++++++++++++end editor's note++++++++++++++++++++
African media breaks 'culture of silence'
Journalists struggle to give voice, expand freedoms
By Kwame Karikari
From Africa Renewal, August 2010, page 23
http://www.un.org/ecosocdev/geninfo/afrec/vol24no2-3/
[Professor Kwame Karikari is executive director of the Media
Foundation for West Africa (http://www.mediafound.org),
headquartered in Accra, Ghana, and heads the School of
Communication Studies at the University of Ghana.
Africa Renewal, now in its 24th year of publication by the United
Nations, features a wide variety of articles on African
development. Issues from 1996 are available on-line at
http://www.un.org/ecosocdev/geninfo/afrec/magazine.html
The site also provides a web portal with access to a wide range of
news and commentary. See http://www.un.org/ecosocdev/geninfo/afrec/]
When on 18 March this year the Daily Nation, one of Africa's
biggest and most successful independent newspapers, celebrated its
50th anniversary, Charles Onyango Obbo, a columnist for the
Nairobi, Kenya, paper, wrote, "It has mostly been hell on earth for
the African media for most of these 50 years. In fact the freest
period for the African media generally has been the 15-year period
between 1990 and 2005."
The media boom of the late 1980s and early 1990s, accompanying the
movement for democratic reforms in Africa, transformed the
continent's media landscape virtually overnight. It ended
near-absolute government control and monopoly and ushered in a
vibrant pluralism. Suddenly the streets of Africa's capitals were
awash with newspapers. The "culture of silence," imposed first
under colonialism and then by post-colonial military dictatorships
and autocratic one-party states, was rudely broken.
Independent media boom
At independence in 1960 most newspapers were privately owned,
organs either of the nationalist political movements and parties or
of businesses mostly established by European investors. But by 1970
most newspapers of any significance across the continent were
government-owned. Any newspaper expressing independent editorial
attitudes was censored, banned or so controlled that most of the
owners gave up publishing. Besides apartheid South Africa, only
Kenya and Nigeria accommodated private and independent press
businesses, even then under enormous political constraints.
In a few countries, such as Gambia and Niger, the first daily
newspapers appeared in the period of media liberalization and boom.
One man, the Liberian journalist Kenneth Best, started the first
daily in Liberia (1981) and the first daily in Gambia (1992). Mr.
Best eventually had to flee both countries.
Since the 1990s the independent media have grown like the savannah
grass after prolific rainfalls following a long drought. In West
Africa, according to a 2006 study sponsored by the UN Economic
Commission for Africa (ECA), there were over 5,000 newspapers and
radio and television stations in 15 countries.
By far the most earth-shaking development was the burst of radio
stations. From the capitals to the provinces, the booming force of
private and independent voices initially threatened to drown out
the states' authoritarian broadcasting systems. In semi-desert
Mali, for instance, there are today nearly 300 radio stations. In
the war-ravaged Democratic Republic of the Congo there are about
196 community radio stations. Across the continent, the Internet
and mobile telephony augment old media to expand Africans' sources
of information and means of mass communication.
The armed conflicts of the 1990s did not seem to hinder the
emergence of independent media anywhere, although many media
outlets did become targets. Somalia saw the emergence of its first
independent press, radio and even TV after it plunged into
continuing anarchy. Numerous stations and newspapers emerged in
Liberia and Sierra Leone during their notoriously bloody conflicts,
while the state-owned broadcasting systems all but collapsed.
Today, two decades since the media boom, Eritrea is about the only
country in sub-Saharan Africa in which government has a total
monopoly on press and broadcasting.
Strengthening democracy
Linus Gitahi, chief executive of Kenya's Nation Media Group (NMG),
said at the Pan-African Media Conference during the Daily Nation's
anniversary, "More Africans live in relative freedom today than
they did 50 years ago."
No doubt the media's role has been central in strengthening
democracy in those countries where there has been tangible progress
in governance and respect for human rights. Weak though they may often be, the media, especially the
independent outlets, have made remarkable contributions to peaceful
and transparent elections in Benin, Cape Verde, Ghana, Mali,
Namibia, South Africa and Zambia; to post-conflict transitions and
the restoration of peace in Liberia, Mozambique and Sierra Leone;
and to sustaining constitutional rule in times of political crises
in Guinea, Kenya and Nigeria. And many continue to push to open up
the space for freedom in suffocating environments.
Radio has expanded local news and information production. And the
mobile phone has enhanced citizens' participation in public affairs
discussions on the air. Radio, by incorporating many local
languages more widely, has promoted positive cultural identity in
many communities. At the 10th anniversary this January of Ghana's
Radio Ada, a community station at Ada, a coastal town about 100
kilometres from the capital, the chief lamented, "Until the station
came here, we did not hear our language on radio. We did not feel
that we belonged in Ghana."
In some cases, however, the media have been an instrument of hate,
xenophobia and crimes against humanity. While Rwanda's Radio Milles
Collines, which played a role in the country's genocide, is the
most known, there have been other disturbing examples of media
promotion of ethnic hate, as in the bloody aftermath of Kenya's
2007 elections. Even in Ghana's much-celebrated successful election
in 2008, some radio stations incessantly preached violence and
mobilized partisan mobs to attack opponents. In all such cases the
perpetrating media were owned by or were supporters of powerful
persons in government, political parties or factions in conflicts.
Continuing repression
The progressive thrust of the media has generally come up against
violent repression. When the media have dared to question or
uncover criminality and corruption in high places, they have
usually earned the extreme wrath of "where power lies."
Thus virtually all assassinations of journalists, such as that of
Norbert Zongo in Burkina Faso in 1998, Carlos Cardoso in Mozambique
in 2000 or Deyda Heydara in Gambia in 2004, have had similar
motives. The report of an independent commission on the Zongo case
concluded that "Norbert Zongo was assassinated purely for political
reasons, because he practiced committed investigative journalism.
He defended a democratic ideal and was committed, through his
newspaper, to fight for the respect of human rights and justice
against bad governance of the public goods and against impunity."
Various international media rights advocacy groups, such as the New
York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, calculate that around
200 journalists have been killed in Africa in the last two decades.
The majority of the victims fell in circumstances of war.
The use of repressive legislation has been a major tool in
reversing the media's freedoms. Outside of South Africa, where the
post-apartheid transition included fundamental reforms in media
legislation, the new atmosphere of media pluralism elicited very
negligible legal and policy reforms beyond constitutional clauses
reaffirming UN principles on free expression.
By 2005 legislative and policy frameworks in most countries were so
constraining that the ECA said in a study, "The need for a critical
review and overhaul of the legal and policy environment in which
the media operates across Africa cannot be overstated."
While individual countries may not have made significant reforms to
media legislation and policy, the African Union and regional bodies
such as the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the
Southern African Development Community and the 11-member Regional
Conference of the Great Lakes have all adopted binding protocols
and declarations advancing press freedom and freedom of expression.
Most member governments may be violating or ignoring the protocols
they have signed, but civil society groups use institutions such as
the Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression and Access to
Information of the African Commission on Human and People's Rights
to promote media rights. Some, such as the Media Foundation for
West Africa, also use the new regional ECOWAS Community Court of
Justice to challenge violations of journalists' rights.
Constraints and limitations
If violent attacks and disabling laws have been used to arrest the
media's growth and relevance, professional and financial weaknesses
have tended to limit their impact. Despite the phenomenal growth of the media, Professor Guy Berger of
the Rhodes University School of Journalism and Media Studies in
South Africa insisted in 2007 that "Africans are the least-served
people of the world in terms of the circulation of information, for
the reason that this continent exhibits a mass media that is
everywhere limited in terms of quantity, and also sometimes
quality."
Professor Berger noted, for example, that Africa had the world's
lowest number of journalists per capita. South Africa, the
continent's highest performer, had one journalist per 1,300
citizens, while Ghana had one per 11,000, Cameroon one per 18,000,
Zimbabwe one per 34,000 and Ethiopia one per 99,000.
The huge deficit in trained professionals keeps increasing, despite
donor support for short ad hoc courses and the emergence of private
training schools.
Of all the constraints and limitations, economic factors appear to
be the most critical threat to the survival of media pluralism.
Most media outlets remain small operations, with poor business
management capacity. But a few like the NMG in Kenya and Multimedia
in Ghana have expanded investment into other media, and extended
operations across borders into other countries. Yet while a few are
growing into huge, multimedia transnational conglomerates, many
face the possibility of shrinkage and perhaps extinction.
As media pluralism grows and African economies open up, the media's
growing dependence on the market threatens to limit editorial
independence. Businesses that are visibly dominant in advertising
and sponsorships are reported by journalists to be exerting
pressure on media to do their bidding, such as by killing stories
unfavourable to the businesses.
Such pressures and attacks on press freedom have also propelled the
emergence of advocacy and defence organizations across the
continent. The Media Institute of Southern Africa in Windhoek, the
Media Foundation for West Africa based in Accra, the Media Rights
Agenda of Nigeria and Journalists in Danger in Kinshasa are among
the best known. National and regional professional journalists'
associations have also stepped up their defence of media
professionals.
Although state broadcasting persists, dominating the airwaves in
most countries, independent and pluralistic media in Africa are
here to stay, despite the many challenges. And that may be the
guarantee of the growth and strengthening of democracy in Africa.
Botswana: Why South Africa's Media Fight Matters to Us
Thapelo Ndlovu
16 September 2010
Committee to Protect Journalists (New York)
http://www.cpj.org
Thapelo Ndlovu is a journalist, civil society activist, and
director of Media Institute of Southern Africa (Botswana).
For Batswana journalists, news that their South African colleagues
are busy warding off a proposed statutory media tribunal from the
ruling African National Congress sounds all too familiar. For more
than a decade, the government of Botswana has been trying to push
a media law that would effectively shift the whole media under
state control.
This was eventually achieved as in December 2008, the Media
Practitioners Act came to being after being pushed through
parliament by the dominant ruling Botswana Democratic party. The
implementation of the act has however been frustrated by fierce
advocacy by Botswana media groups, with the key assistance of the
Law Society of Botswana, which also refused to participate in the
implementation as required.
Wrapped in a sheep's skin of general principles guaranteeing the
operational independence of the media and the creation of a
statutory press council that "shall be wholly independent and
separate from the government, any political party or any other
body," the act reveals in its fine print to have glaring
contradictions. It calls for the creation of a new Media Council,
whose key committees would operate under the exclusive control of
the minister of communication, a political appointee.
The latter has wide discretion to handpick the members of the
complaints and appeals committees and can dismiss the members of
the executive branch. Also problematic is a draconian registration
and accreditation regime reminiscent of the one enforced in
Zimbabwe until recently, as any publisher not registered by the
Media Council could be fined as much as P5,000 (US$781) or face up
to three months in jail.
This is despite the fact that, just like in South Africa, Botswana
currently has a self-regulatory Press Council that has been
operating since 2002. The council has a code of ethics for
journalists and takes complaints from the public regarding the
media. And the public, especially politicians, take advantage of
civil defamation laws.
It was in this context that, on August 13, a motley set of 32
individuals and groups representing media houses, NGOs, and trade
unions filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the
law. Supported by the Southern African Litigation Centre and the
Media Institute of Southern Africa, the litigation is led by the
well-experienced local attorney Dick Bayford and the South African
advocate Steven Budlender.
The involvement of Botswana civil society has underscored the value
of the free flow of information to sections of the society other
than the press. For instance, United Congregational Church of
southern Africa, a big church in the Southern African Development
Community (SADC) region and one of the oldest in the country,
counts among its congregation both prominent members of society and
rural folks who mingle together in prayer. In a letter of
solidarity the church, through its secretary general, Rev. Prince
Dibeela, offered its unequivocal support to the court case as they
view the act as a "draconian move that seeks to clamp down on civil
liberties of people of Botswana."
Similarly, Andrew Motsamai, representing Botswana Federation of
Public Sector Unions, expressed the fear that as trade unionists,
they would be required to register in order to write articles for
newspapers. The Botswana Network on Ethics, Law, and HIV & AIDS
expressed fears that the act might compromise their efforts in on
HIV and AIDS advocacy--since it is already going to limit access to
information. They decried the fact that the country already does
not have a law that guarantees access to information.
Generally regarded as one of the most sensible governments in the
SADC region, let alone the continent, Botswana's seemingly sudden
departure from universal democratic practices is not so sudden
after all. Signs of suppression have always been there, as
evidenced by a series of deportations of journalists and human
rights activists over time. Just like his predecessors, President
Ian Khama has increasingly become uncomfortable with the media.
His distaste of the media first came to light when while an army
commander, when he supposedly banned the distribution of the
Botswana Gazette at the army barracks. Khama was quoted in the
media at the time as having proclaimed that he does not read local
newspapers. On his ascendancy to the throne in April 2008, his
first pronouncement about the media was wedged somewhere between
the country's other social ills, such as alcoholism. It was
therefore not totally surprising when after a few months into the
administration, in December 2008, the government finally enacted a
bill known as the Media Practitioners Act that was a result of a
decade's heavy debate. For someone who has never held a single
press conference in office, Khama has the ball is in his court to
prove his detractors wrong.
What has lately come to the fore is that this political attitude
toward the media is not unique to Botswana, but is fast spreading
in the SADC region. The biggest surprise, besides Botswana, has
been South Africa where the media is furiously fighting for its
life. What is apparent though, is that unlike the rest of the media
in the region, the affluence of the South African press gives it
the strength to fight the government head on.
I would argue that the current situation deserves a regional
approach. South African media will not enjoy their freedom and good
constitution as long as their leaders share notes with others whose
views of these rights are questionable. It is therefore imperative
that with its influence in world matters, the South African media
start being responsive to regional challenges.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu Endorses Declaration of Table Mountain
Grahamstown, South Africa, 8 July 2010
http://www.wan-press.org/article18590.html
Nobel Peace Prize laureate Desmond Tutu of South Africa has
endorsed the Declaration of Table Mountain, a media industry call
to African heads of state to repeal insult and criminal defamation
laws and place a free press higher on the political agenda.
"You, the media, have one of the most powerful instruments in
helping our societies to value the truth," said Archbishop Tutu,
addressing hundreds of journalists attending the Highway Africa
media conference at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa.
Archbishop Tutu's endorsement of the Declaration of Table Mountain
is a major boost for a campaign that has been gaining signatories
and widespread support across Africa. Full details about the
Declaration, an initiative of the World Association of Newspapers
and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA), can be found at
http://www.declarationoftablemountain.org
"The Archbishop's voice, added to those already committed to
repealing insult and criminal defamation laws across Africa, will
help deliver a clear message of change to those in power," said the
WAN-IFRA CEO, Christoph Riess.
Archbishop Tutu, a leader in the South African struggle that
eliminated apartheid, is known for his defence of human rights. He
was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984.
The three-day Highway Africa conference welcomed close to 500
African and international journalists and media experts to debate
the issues facing the African media. A majority of participants
also pledged their support to the Declaration and signed-up to
actively promote the campaign in their countries.
The WAN-IFRA Declaration of Table Mountain Campaign is supported by
the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency. Sida and
WAN-IFRA conduct an ambitious strategic partnership to advance
media development and press freedom worldwide. A series of projects
to support freedom of expression and to test new methods and
approaches in strengthening media in emerging markets was launched
this year.
For more on these projects, please consult http://www.wan-press.org
WAN-IFRA is the global organisation for the world's newspapers and
news publishers, with formal representative status at the United
Nations, UNESCO and the Council of Europe. Inquiries to: Larry
Kilman, Director of Communications and Public Affairs, WAN-IFRA, 7
rue Geoffroy St Hilaire, 75005 Paris, France. Tel: +33 6 10 28 97
36. E-mail: [email protected].
AfricaFocus Bulletin is an independent electronic publication
providing reposted commentary and analysis on African issues, with
a particular focus on U.S. and international policies. AfricaFocus
Bulletin is edited by William Minter.
AfricaFocus Bulletin can be reached at [email protected]. Please
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