🚀 go-pugleaf

Title: AFRICA-MEDIA: Continent Battles to Communicate with Itself

by Gumisai Mutume

JOHANNESBURG, Feb 21 (IPS) - Picture this scenario: somewhere in
Southern Africa a person spends two whole days manually sending
out a bulletin to about two dozen subscribers by fax.

Often the line breaks down and the process starts again.
Eventually all the pages go through and then the phone calls start
pouring in. ''The fax is blurred, we did not get page three of the
document could you please re-send the whole thing?''

At the end of it all, a phone bill of some 150 U.S. dollars is
the tab for the effort.

This is the stark reality of communications between African
countries. Torn apart by colonial boundaries and still living with the
ties to the former colonial administrators in Europe, decades of
independence have yet to see Africa making contact with itself.

Even the flow of news about Africa remains dominated by agents
that are not homegrown. African countries are still battling to
counter northern perspectives and exchange resources among
themselves. Countries within the same sub-region hardly know what is
happening across the border.

''We knew very little about each other,'' said David Lush of
the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA). ''For instance
newspapers in Botswana were relying on Reuters for a story on
Namibia and if there was no war or famine in Namibia, then no news
about Namibia appeared in the papers.''

Lush is part of a unique news exchange programme between
independent newspapers in the region, known as 'MISANET', which
kicked off in 1994. Some 14 newspapers pool their stories into
bulletins of about 200 stories per week. The service has opened up the
possibilities to circumvent the communication bottlenecks in southern
Africa.

''As a result, there is a flow of regional news ... we are
beginning to break down the information voids that have kept our
countries ignorant about each other,'' Lush told a workshop
organised by the Institute for the Advancement of Journalism in
Johannesburg this week.

''We have achieved in two years more as an independent
initiative than government initiatives on the entire continent
have over so many years,'' said Lush.

Southern Africa is also home to another revolutionary
communications project. SABANEWS links 11 state-owned broadcasters in
the Southern African Broadcasting Association (SABA), which has become
a vital way for the stations to share news.

But elsewhere on the continent such initiatives are struggling.

The Pan African News Agency (PANA) based in Dakar Senegal,
which was set up primarily to report Africa from an African
perspective has failed to meet its mandate.

The agency, set up by the Organisation of African Unity in
1963, has been dogged by financial problems. Three years ago
African countries committed themselves to support a recovery plan for
the embattled agency with a 4.3 million U.S. dollars funding pledge.

Only 3.6 million U.S. dollars has been received according to
Amadou Mahtar, head of marketing at PANA. The organisation is now
considering privatisation as its only salvation.

''In southern Africa the political environment is such that it
allows these dreams and aspirations,'' said Nigerian Debo Adesina of
the Guardian newspaper. ''It is difficult in Nigeria. We are battling
against a lot of odds ... leadership ... intolerance.''

Adesina said that even sending a simple E-mail remains out of
the reach of the ordinary Nigerian, and networking on the World
Wide Web is for now, a pipedream. ''Our biggest problem is lack of
political will''.

Jared Okungu of Kenya's 'The Nation' newspapers said that there
are efforts to set up similar initiatives like SABA in East
Africa.

But he noted that Africa's biggest problem is that the media
focuses more on the international scene than events at home.
Vast areas of the continent remain under-reported and ignored
except in times of crises.

The 1990s witnessed a dismantling of the Berlin wall and the
end of the Cold War. The prospects of a new world order brought
new challenges for countries of the south, which had to reconsider how
they told their own story.

All of a sudden, new issues took the spotlight -- moves towards
democratisation, structural adjustment, good governance, human
rights, gender, all became issues of debate and had to be placed
on the news agenda.

Given this climate, it is important, Okungu said, that Africa
communicates with itself and its media must begin to report on
Africa for Africans.

''It is shameful to be here and see that in South Africa there
is very little information about Africa. They have lots of news
about South Africa and then move to South Korea and Australia,''
Okungu said. (end/ips/gm/pm97)


Origin: Harare/AFRICA-MEDIA/


___________________________________________________
Bruce Girard
Agencia Informativa Pulsar
Email: bgirard@pulsar.org.ec
http://www.web.net/amarc/pulsar.html
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