Shooting the messenger...

A major conference has just found that the use of government advertising to reward or punish news media alongside government takeovers of media or the setting up of parallel government media networks in several countries continue to be powerful weapons used to prevent or manipulate the free flow of information. In other words government censorship and control is rife, while media freedom is a myth in these parts.

Relax. They were not talking about Africa (not this time). The conference in question was the 67th General Assembly of the Inter American Press Association (IAPA) held recently in Lima, Peru, and the reference was to a number of Latin American countries.

For example, in Hugo Chávez’s glorious Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, that socialist beacon of freedom and hope to oppressed people everywhere, the government has unceremoniously shut down more than 30 privately owned radio and television stations, while it has also purchased or set up news media of its own.

The previously oppressed people may apparently hear and read only what the government allows them . The truth, it seems, is bad for good people.

Having managed to slip past the government censor, this very regretful news from the lands of Bolivar, Peron, Guevara, Chávez, Pinochet, Castro and other illustrious personae brought to mind the question of what the position might be in Africa.

Much has been written and said the past two years about real or perceived threats to the very free and independent media in South Africa. But what is the position in the rest of Africa? Just how free and independent are the messengers of good and bad tidings, or are they getting shot?

For instance, Botswana and Zimbabwe offer two very different examples of media oppression.

Limited media freedom only recently returned to Zimbabwe after Robert Mugabe’s government had previously managed to shut down all but the state-owned media through harassment, applying draconian laws and measures, requiring massive media registration deposits, confiscating media companies’ computers and printing works, turning down registration applications, and assaulting, arresting and detaining editors and journalists. These measures gave rise, however, to a flourishing Zimbabwean media in exile.

Botswana - where the first newspaper came off the presses way back in 1857 – chose a more sophisticated, more “democratic” route. The government here professes to conscientiously subscribe to the constitutional requirement for a free media and freedom of information.

And indeed, the country has a small variety of privately-owned print and online publications, radio stations and one TV station that operate alongside the dominant state-owned print and broadcast entities. In fact, the Botswana government controls the content of nearly all radio and television broadcasts through the state-run Botswana Press Agency (BOPA), which also produces the free Daily News, the country’s only major newspaper.

But that limited media freedom is also being threatened. After a decade long struggle the ruling Botswana Democratic Party managed in 2008 to push through parliament the Media Practitioners Act.

The matter was wrapped in sheepskins with government paying lip service to upholding and protecting free media and free information flow. But the Act, and its proposed statutory press council, to be controlled by a politically-appointed cabinet minister, severely threaten media freedom in Botswana. The implementation of the Act, however, has been badly frustrated so far by civil society, media groups and the Botswana Law Society.

Although state-owned radio is the dominant news service in Mozambique, and following the socialist period under Samora Machel when all media were state-owned and controlled, and despite high illiteracy levels, Mozambique today has a constitutionally protected and vibrant private media sector.

In contrast in Angola, also a former Portuguese colony like Mozambique, the media is predominantly state-owned and controlled by the formerly Marxist MPLA party led by the long-ruling Jose Eduardo dos Santos. A party-owned newspaper is the only daily, while a few privately-owned weeklies exist.

Although the media in the Democratic Republic of Congo is free and protected, working journalists are often subjected to verbal and physical abuse by government members and officials. In Malawi privately-owned media is viewed with suspicion by the government which has lately cracked down harshly on it, restricting its freedom.

Kenya is one of the more media-friendly African countries with a vibrant, independent media sector. In Cameroon media freedom is constitutionally guaranteed but in practice much of the media is government controlled and government censorship frequently prevents non-government political viewpoints making it into print or onto the airwaves, and harassment of journalists is common.

Nigeria historically has one of the most free and outspoken media traditions in Africa. But under successive military regimes, and even until quite recently under civilian rule, journalists have been harassed, kidnapped, tortured, imprisoned and killed. The situation, however, has recently improved somewhat.

Among the more media-friendly countries of Africa these days – though sometimes not without limitations - one can count Uganda, Ghana, Lesotho, Egypt, Algeria, Liberia, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Ethiopia, Mali, Zambia and Namibia.

And among the more restrictive or media-intolerant countries are Sudan, Ivory Coast, Gabon, Somalia, Swaziland and Equatorial Guinea among more.

The bottom-line however, which should be a headline, is that we in Africa probably have as much if not more reason to be concerned as our Latin American friends when it comes to tolerance, freedom and independence of the media.

Stef Terblanche