Fostering good governance and a vibrant, open society: media focus group outcomes

by Mr. Manoah Esipisu
Senior Reporter, Reuters Southern Africa Bureau

13 October 2004
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

All protocol should be deemed to have been observed. Thank you Akwe, Max and the Communications team at the ECA for initiating and facilitating our focus group discussions.

It is a privilege for me to be involved in this process. Our group has had animated discussions over the past six weeks on the subject and at the end of this session will provide some recommendations on what we believe ought to be done to enhance the media's role as players in improving governance and helping reshape the continent.

I would like to start by quoting Patrice Vahard, an Ivorian lawyer and human rights activist and scholar, who said in a presentation this week:
"For us Africans, the African renaissance -the rise from hopelessness, exploitation and marginalisation -will become reality when development will shift from mere economic growth to a dynamic process of freedom from poverty, discrimination, injustice and ignorance. The challenge is less about the availability of solutions than the will to apply them and the approach, the chemistry of combining available resources and knowledge to achieve relevant and sustainable development."

May I also mention that in a special issue this week, Time magazine named 29 people it said had made an outstanding contribution to world affairs in the past year. Only two of these are Africans -Nigerian Finance Minister Dr Okonjo Iweala and a Sierra Leonian documentary film-maker few of us had heard about before Charles Taylor detained him in 2000 -I am talking of the now acclaimed Sorious Samura.

Sorious Samora has repeatedly risked his life to document the suffering of his fellow Africans and as Time magazine notes, his debut documentary "Cry Freetown" established him as a voice for the continent's too-often forgotten masses. His acclaim results from telling African stories, from Sierra Leone to Liberia, Ethiopia and now the Sudan-Chad border. I. only differ with his view that we need the west to help us find hope. I think hope is within us, we have to dig deep for it. Samura's is personal activism. The question obviously is whether you need an expanded activism to make a deep lasting effect.

In telling African stories, the group identified a number of areas that need reinforcing to position the media as a focal player in improved governance and promotion of sound democratic institutions:

1) Mentorship -What role models are there, who do Africans aspire to emulate? How might we build our own cadre of role models and what help do we need to do that? From newsrooms around Africa, we have to seek partnering journalists with mentors who can help them achieve their optimum best. The Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) is planning such a programme for Ethiopian journalists. It is something that can be carried forward in conjunction with groups such as the. African Economic Editors' Network, run by my colleague and friend Prof. Nixon Kariithi.

2) Training -Journalism training increasingly lacks depth in what I call the world view. In many schools where journalism is taught as an undergraduate subject, journalists do not have an adequate world view, they are schooled in nothing more than reporting and editing or shooting and have little or no capacity to analyse events. A colleague at Bush Radio in Cape Town told me this week here in Addis Ababa that she used mostly trainees in her newsroom, who had limited ability to deliver basic stories, leave alone speak in governance terms.\ft may well be that political science, diplomacy, economics or other subjects could be added to journalism as additional modules. In addition, we must interrogate the models and modules for journalistic scholarship and whether it helps African journalists meet African needs.

3) Illiteracy -Governments need to double or triple their efforts to increase literacy levels to enable their people to take informed decisions based on knowledge and available facts. Being the conduit of information is easier when your audience can understand and relate to the issues one if engaging with.

4) Technology. The Internet has encouraged cut and paste artists able to pretend to intimately understand events at the expense of traditions of solid journalism. We have to understand that technology is our friend but also threatens the profession. Improved training and newsroom leadership could yet deliver the desired result. I dare say, though, that some newsrooms on the continent are still archaic, they have not reached a level where each journalist has a terminal of their own and this is a serious matter. When the globe is talking about 4G mobile licenses, barely half a dozen 3G licenses exist and rollout of previous models if far from impressive.

5) Overcoming paranoia and hyper-activity by some governments. Governments need to learn to live with the media. I have not had many journalists claim to run or punish governments although I hear many government officials with little or no knowledge of the intricacies of our profession pretend to know how we must work and act and seek to run newsrooms from the luxury of their tax-paid-for mansions. Journalism can be government's ally if government acts right, does not provide qualified access or no access at all and consistently gives its side of the story. The South African government may not always like what the media is doing, but it always avails its point of view as well. Now I know that some governments take the harsh route out -ban publications or outlaw what they perceive as negative journalism. Governments should be encouraged to engage with the media as co-existence is necessary. Governments should also be encouraged to desist from labelling or name- calling. After all, are we not capable of doing exactly the same, better?

May I add that journalists should not confuse weak governance with weak government. Dictators do not necessarily head weak governments although their governance structures are weak. Direct government interference in editorial work, which persists throughout the continent, is among the worst forms of paranoia and hyper-sensitivity I referred to and governments should be encouraged to stay out of newsrooms.

6) There are those who say proliferation of private media houses, though positive, has increased cases of misreporting and reluctance by those involved to adhere to media ethics. Media houses and governments should encourage the creation of media complaints commissions to deal with these questions of ethics and omission. All our countries already have fairly strong laws on questions of defamation and can adequately deal with matters beyond such a commission. Governments meantime have to continue to be encouraged to strengthen their judicial systems, whose weakness sometimes is simply stunning.

7) Back to basics. Accuracy, unbiased information, context (and some of us will add speed). Context is king. We in the media are sometimes our own worst enemies. We have to note that a few rogue reports are able to ruin our reputations, however long it has taken us to build them. This one is squarely in our court and we should encourage newsroom leaders on the continent to seek to strike and maintain quality journalism.
For example, in the ADF Today of 11 October 2004, a wrote: "Professor Francis Kasoma, a media scholar, postulates that most governments in Africa are not keen to let go off news organisations as they are key trappings of power." Now the good professor is not in Addis Ababa for the ADF. He died a few months ago. The author was citing one of Kasoma's works without sourcing or explaining the context- and herein is one of the continent's biggest journalism pitfalls.

8) Growing a bigger cadre of professionals. We have to learn, like all other professions, to grow and keep our top quality performers. A dearth of journalism professionals and slow growth of younger, able journalists remains a key concern of newsrooms across the continent. At last week's Vodacom Journalist of the Year awards in South Africa, there were no winners for a number of spots in several regions -from all media genres -radio, broadcast, print. Presenters wondered what was happening to quality if Kwazulu-Natal, a huge province in sporting terms could not produce a good sports story or Cape Town, with several radio stations, had no winner for a radio news story. We would raise the same question.

9) Perceptions -this goes with growing a cadre of professionals. We need to do more to convince the public that we are indeed professionals. One of my colleagues has said that journalists in many areas aren't taken seriously because they do not ask searching questions. That may only be partly so. I think they are also seen as pests, interfering in the activities of people that might want to be more secretive. The bottom line is facts, facts and more facts. If we get the facts and analysis right, we can start to build our reputations again. Now governments employ most journalists on the continent. If governments can also pay journalists as well as they pay other professionals, it will raise standards of living within the media. As you know, inflation knows not what sector of the economy one comes from. Along with this, we have launch or continue a battle to ensure women journalists win recognition on the merits of their work and are not persistently harassed either at their own places of work or by contacts in the public domain or private sector. We also have to to enhance our integrity and ethics.

10) Ownership and allegiance. This has something to do with the piper and the tune. As Kgosi Leruo, King of the Bafokeng Nation of South Africa asked in a presentation this week, "To who are Africa's leaders responsible? .It is a question we pose to African media houses. It is a question at the heart of our ability to deliver a balanced worldview.

11) HIV and AIDS. Like many other professional groups, journalists continue to succumb in their numbers to HIV and AIDS. Media houses must embrace the message, actively supplementing efforts of governments and non-government agencies deeply involved in the anti- AIDS campaign. Former Mozambique Education Minister and child rights activist Graca Machel once told me, "We want to train people to live and work for our nations to the fullest, not to die." That must apply to our profession and our nations as well. AIDS is a serious governance subject that requires all stakeholders to gather to tackle it.

12) Rooting for the home team. As in soccer, increasingly we see some among us keen to root for their home teams. A visit to the Pentagon will reveal which channel is watched on virtually the entire building. We must deal with the question of patriotic bias, which may yet pose a danger to the future of the profession.

In conclusion, we sought to answer what type of additional challenges we face in the future and identified three: a) building trust (believability, credibility, predictability -that what we publish or broadcast will be true), b) continuing to build communities and linking them in line with their common interests and c) improving how we communicate - embracing technology and using it as a tool to better deliver our stories.

These are massive issues we have to tackle to meaningfully contribute to better governance on our continent.

• Presentation on behalf of the media focus group by Manoah Esipisu, senior correspondent, Reuters SA, based in Johannesburg. Esipisu is also a media, governance and democracy scholar at the Centre for African Renaissance Studies (CARS), University of South Afi'ica, in Pretoria, and a founder member of the African Economic Editors' Network. This presentation is in Esipisu's personal capacity. It does not reflect the views of Reuters SA or CARS. Esipisu can be contacted at manoah.esipisu@reuters.com and mesiQisu@.hounail.com.