African Journalists Struggle to Find their Role in Building Democracies
Barbara Borst
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Abstract
Journalists in Zimbabwe, Kenya and South Africa reflect on a year of strife that has challenged not only their reporting skills but also their ideas about the role of journalism in democracy-building.
Introduction
Kenyan officials announced disputed results in the December presidential elections and quickly imposed a ban on live broadcasts. Zimbabwean journalists braved arrest and threats for reporting on the country’s economic collapse and political violence. In South Africa, the fight for control of the ruling African National Congress increased tensions between politicians and the press.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees the right “to
seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”1 The U.N. Development Programme calls free and independent news media “another crucial pillar of democracy.”2 Treaties and other international organizations echo those values. Journalists and press freedom organizations agree, of course, and set out lofty codes of conduct to define their role.3
Despite all the rhetorical unanimity, in practice freedom of the press often involves a battle between those who hold power and those who seek to monitor the powerful. That competition prevails worldwide, especially in countries struggling to found or to consolidate democracy. The violence in Kenya and Zimbabwe this year, as well as South Africa’s political fight, have prompted journalists from those countries to reflect on their role.
Zimbabwe
“There is difficulty in covering the complete destruction of your own country,” said Gerry Jackson, station manager for SW Radio Africa, based outside London. “You have no mental distance.”4
Jackson and other Zimbabwean journalists in exile feel it is vital for Zimbabweans and the world to know of the suffering of ordinary citizens. Land expropriation, corruption, unemployment and inflation in the millions of percent have driven Zimbabwe’s economy into the ground in the past decade. Now 5.1 million of its 12 million inhabitants face “severe food shortages.5 Nearly 3 million Zimbabweans have fled to South Africa6 and tens of thousands more to Britain.
In March, President Robert Mugabe, who has ruled for 28 years, suffered his first loss at the polls when opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai of the Movement for Democratic Change won a plurality. Supporters of Mugabe’s Zanu-PF unleashed a wave of violence as the June run-off approached, killing more than 100 people.7 Tsvangirai withdrew rather than risk more lives.
“I don’t think any of us expected this descent into violence,” Jackson said. Her team prepares radio shows that reach parts of their homeland by short-wave from neighboring countries. She said it is hard to know how many Zimbabweans hear the programs but added that the website gets 100,000 to 250,000 visits a day.
The station struggles for cash, and Zimbabwe officials have denounced it as one of several “pirate radio stations.”8 South Africa mediated a power-sharing agreement between Mugabe and Tsvangirai, but at this writing, talks on how to split the ministries were in jeopardy.9 The shaky agreement says governments that host or fund “external radio stations” must cease because the broadcasts “are not in Zimbabwe’s national interest.”10
Jackson, however, sees a vital role for the news media in rebuilding the country.
“It’s a completely damaged society,” she said. “If we are not free to talk about it, it will stay trapped forever.”
Zimbabwe once had independent newspapers, well-trained journalists and a lively international press corps to balance the state-controlled media. But Mugabe’s government imposed such measures as the 2002 Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act, which requires publications and journalists to register with the government.11
The Daily News, founded in 1999 by editor Geoff Nyarota and publisher Wilf Mbanga, survived bombs at its offices and printing plant in 2000-2001 and multiple arrests.12 But it lost a court challenge to AIPPA and shut down in 2003.13
No independent dailies survive, leaving the field to the state-controlled media: the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation, and the Herald and Chronicle newspapers. A few independent weeklies still publish, notably The Standard and The Zimbabwe Independent. Foreign journalists have limited access.
Meanwhile, former Daily News publisher Mbanga launched The Zimbabwean, a print and online publication, from Britain in 2005.14 He said circulation has reached 200,000 copies, with 3.8 million visits to the Web site per week during the elections.15
In May 2008, gunmen hijacked and burned a truck bringing 60,000 copies of The Zimbabwean across the border from South Africa.16 Then the government jacked up taxes on imports. Mbanga wrote about the problems of reporting on Zimbabwe for Harvard’s Nieman Reports:17
- In the past few years countless numbers of journalists have been harassed, arrested, beaten, tortured and locked up…Under such conditions it is virtually impossible to operate as a professional news organization. We do our best to get the story out and break the silence by exposing the appalling human rights abuses and government corruption. The finer points of journalism have, regrettably, had to be compromised in the desperate battle for access to information. This is guerrilla journalism…
Like Mbanga, Stephanie Wolters, Africa director for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, works with journalists inside Zimbabwe who risk arrest for reporting without government accreditation. 18
IWPR, a London-based non-profit that trains and supports journalists, publishes their work online in weekly “Zimbabwe Crisis Reports.”
“I think Zimbabwe is fortunate in that it has a really good pool of journalists who are well trained…and passionate about the work,” Wolters said. But, if they say they are journalists, they face arrest and threats of violence; if they don’t, they have trouble covering events and interviewing officials, she said. “They all write under pseudonyms. It isn’t ideal [in terms of] accountability,” she added.
The Media Institute of Southern Africa’s Zimbabwe chapter charges that the state broadcaster and government-controlled newspapers “remained as firmly entrenched in Zanu-PF propaganda as ever before” despite the power-sharing agreement with the opposition.19
Wolters said the problem goes beyond propaganda; it’s a question of survival. “Particularly because of the humanitarian crisis, people need information,” she said. “They are completely deprived.”
Kenya
Partial results in Kenya’s presidential election showed the opposition Orange Democratic Movement ahead by 900,000 votes the morning of Dec. 29, dropping to 38,000 by evening.20 The next day, Kenya’s TV stations reported live as the electoral commission announced returns that would keep President Mwai Kibaki in power and ODM backers cried fraud.21 The army ordered all journalists out of the building except the state broadcaster, KBC, which soon broadcast Kibaki’s swearing in.22 Protests, crackdowns, riots and ethnic killing quickly erupted, and the information ministry banned live coverage of the conflict.
More than 1,000 people were killed and 300,000 fled their homes23 as gangs fought in the slums, police clashed with protesters and looters, and rival tribes in the country’s fertile Rift Valley killed over politics and land.
Kenya’s newspapers and television stations struggled to cover both the violence and the political fight. Many feared that broadcast media would be misused to incite violence, as RTLM radio had done during Rwanda’s 1994 genocide.24
That fear made Kenya’s journalists hesitate to dig up the truth, according to a March report by three international non-profit organizations — Reporters Without Borders, International Media Support and Article 19.25
“The media in Africa does not always enthusiastically join in political crises by egging on murderous militants, as is often believed, and Kenya’s press, in the violent aftermath of last 27 December’s disputed presidential election, was a very good example of how it does not,” the report says.26
Kenya’s media called on politicians to negotiate a solution and citizens to seek reconciliation. Newspapers published joint prayers for peace.27
“But the risk they took in doing this was to fail in their duty to report the facts, present them to those involved in events and let the public judge the result,” the report says.28
While well-intentioned, calls for peace diverted news organizations from investigating who really won the elections and who perpetrated fraud.29
“Preaching is not a journalist’s main job. The alleged fraud in a presidential election was clearly an urgent matter for the media and its journalists. But in the interests of restoring public order they deliberately chose to ignore it while thousands of Kenyans poured
into the streets in search of ‘truth’ and ‘justice,’” the report says.30
Salim Amin, who heads Camerapix, an independent multimedia company in Nairobi, said the problems for Kenyan news media predated the violence.31
“The public felt the news media took sides long before the electoral process. Local media made life difficult for themselves by their stands,” Amin said. Kenyan media that reported partial election results may have intended to curb fraud, but they stoked the opposition’s hopes, perhaps adding to the intensity of public anger, he noted.
The violence was dangerous for all journalists to cover, but particularly so for Kenyans, who risked being of the “wrong” ethnic group in a fluid battle. Certain communities were hostile toward journalists they saw as partisan.32
“Some places you couldn’t send anyone. We were quite hindered,” Amin said.
The ban on live coverage drew international criticism.33 But Amin said it wouldn’t have been an issue if Kenyan broadcasters had the type of delay switch used in wealthier countries to monitor for offensive speech.34
He also spoke highly of the media’s “quite unprecedented” calls for peace.
“I think they did a good job in the end,” he said. “They talked about being Kenyan, as opposed to Luo, Kikuyu or something else.”
Amin, who has just launched a pan-African online news agency called A24 and heads the Mohamed Amin journalism training center, said Kenyan media need more training, higher pay to keep journalists independent and a focus on holding the powerful to account.
“One of the big issues in Africa is accountability…between public and
governments or NGOs, whoever is operating on this continent,” he said. “We as journalists need to be that independent voice highlighting what the problems are, who causes the problems.”
South Africa
For South Africa’s strong independent news sector, covering the flash of violence against African immigrants in May was straightforward compared with reporting the battle that may yet split the African National Congress. News organizations fear that chilly relations between journalists and politicians may turn colder still.
“Both for us and for our colleagues in Kenya, the key thing not to do is to embed” with a political faction, said Ferial Haffajee, editor-in-chief of the Mail & Guardian.35
Partisan journalism might be fine in Britain or the United States, but it can be a problem in a young democracy, she said.
The ANC has been the ruling party since Nelson Mandela won the country’s first all-race elections in 1994. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission held three days of hearings in 1997 on the news media role under apartheid, and in 2000 the South African Human Rights Commission examined complaints that whites still controlled the news.36
Mandela’s deputy, Thabo Mbeki, who won two terms (the maximum) as president, often criticized news organizations but didn’t take action against them. In 2001, his government met with the South African National Editors’ Forum to establish a working relationship.37 However, a battle continues over whether the state broadcaster, the South African Broadcasting Company, should reflect party line.38 In 2005, Mbeki fired his deputy president, Jacob Zuma, over Zuma’s ties to a financial adviser convicted of corruption in an arms sale.39 Last December, Zuma ousted Mbeki from the party presidency, setting himself up to be the ANC’s choice in the 2009 presidential elections. A High Court dismissed corruption charges against Zuma in September on a technicality, saying that Mbeki’s government had interfered in the case.40
After the National Prosecuting Authority launched an appeal, the ANC, under Zuma, forced Mbeki to resign.41
For the news media, the question is how to cover these shifts, many of them hidden within party circles rather than decided openly. Dingilizwe Ntuli, a political writer at the Sunday Times, said many South African journalists don’t fathom how the ANC works and, thus, succumb to spin from factions and dissidents.42
“Real ANC people do not take the media seriously; they listen to their leaders,” Ntuli said, adding that there is some truth to ANC criticism that print media are “elitist” because they serve the middle class in a country where most are poor.
The Sunday Times was the first to report that Zuma was charged with the rape of a friend’s daughter.43 Zuma was later acquitted.
Ntuli said Zuma supporters are hostile toward the Sunday Times and the Mail & Guardian, which puts pressure on journalists. “You’re the biggest paper. You must be breaking stories. When you break stories, the ANC says you’re plotting,” he added. The Mail & Guardian was the first to report that Zuma was allegedly involved in the arms sale corruption.44 Haffajee says that, before the corruption and rape cases, Zuma was “a media darling.” Now his supporters want him to rein in the news media. The ANC plans an as-yet undefined media appeals tribunal and other measures that “are going to be harmful in the long term,” she added.
“Zuma believes himself to be poorly treated by the media,” Haffajee said, but she added that the Mail & Guardian reported facts, not opinion, and strives always to include Zuma’s side.
Conclusions
Anton Harber, former editor of South Africa’s Mail & Guardian and now a journalism professor at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, looked back at the change from running an anti-apartheid newspaper to reporting on a fledgling democracy:
-
New democracies pose a particular challenge for journalists. They are vulnerable and sometimes shaky. One wants them to work and, therefore, one is seeking to define not just what constitutes high-quality and interesting journalism but also how one can best contribute to helping democracy take root45
Journalists from Zimbabwe, Kenya and South Africa are asking just such questions about their role in building democracy in their homelands.
Barbara Borst, a journalist specializing in international affairs, was based in Kenya and South Africa for five years, has reported throughout that continent and researches the role of the news media in democracy-building in Africa, the Balkans and the Palestinian territories. She teaches in two NYU departments: the Center for Global Affairs as an Adjunct Associate Professor and the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.
Footnotes
1. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19, http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html
2. UNDP Human Development Report, 2002, “Deepening Democracy in a Fragmented World,” p. 6, http://hdr.undp.org/en/media/HDR_2002_EN_Overview.pdf
3. See the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, New Partnership for Africa’s Development and U.S. Agency for International Development.
4. Jackson, Gerry, interview with the author, by telephone from Britain, Oct. 9, 2008
5. World Food Programme press release “Major food appeal for Zimbabwe…” Oct. 9, 2008
6. Nullis, Claire, “UN donates 2,000 tents for foreigners…” The Associated Press, May 30, 2008
7. Bryson, DOnna, “Zimbabwe opposition: 113 members killed since March,” The Associated Press, July 11, 2008
8, “Zimbabwe: President to Meet MDC Leaders,” The Herald, Oct. 10, 2008 http://allafrica.com/stories/200810100008.html
9. “MDC Seeks New Zimbabwe Election,” The BBC online, Oct. 21, 2008 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7681468.stm
10. “Agreement Between the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front…” Article 19, Sept. 15, 2008 http://swradioafrica.com/pages/fultext160908.htm
11. Committee to Protect Journalists report “Attacks on the Press in 2007,” section on Zimbabwe http://cpj.org/attacks07/africa07/zim07.html
12. UNESCO, “Geoffrey Nyarota of Zimbabwe Awarded World Press Freedom Prize 2002,” “http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=1869&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html
13. Ronning, Helge, “African Journalism and the Struggle for Democratic Media,” in Making Journalists, edited by Hugo de Burgh, Routledge, London and New York, 2005, p. 157-9
14. Mbanga, Wilf, interview by the author, in person, in Britain, July 8, 2005
15. Mbanga, Wilf “Zimbabwe: Telling the Story, Reporting the News,” Nieman Reports, Harvard, Fall 2008 http://nieman.harvard.edu/reportsitem.aspx?id=100420
16. “News Distributors Beaten in Zimbabwe; Papers Burned,” Committee to Protect Journalists, May 27, 2008 http://cpj.org/news/2008/africa/zim27may08na.html
18. Wolters, Stephanie, interview with the author, by telephone from South Africa, Oct. 10, 2008
19. Zhangazha, Takura, “Power sharing: Public hope and necessity of reforming state media,” Media Institute of Southern Africa — Zimbabwe, http://www.misazim.co.zw/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=345&Itemid=1
20. Reporters Without Borders, International Media Support and Article 19, report “How far to go?” March 3, 2008, p.2
23. Odula, Tom, “Commission: Kenya should form a tribunal…” The Associated Press, Oct. 15, 2008
24. Author’s visit to Kenya, Jan. 9-20, 2008
25. Reporters Without Borders et al, p. 1, 5-6
27. Ibid, p. 4-5, and author’s visit
28. Reporters Without Borders et al, p. 1
31. Amin, Salim, interview with the author, by telephone from Kenya, Oct. 15, 2008
33. Reports Without Borders et al, p. 3
35. Haffajee, Ferial, interview with the author, by telephone from South Africa, Oct. 13, 2008
36 Kruger, Franz, Black, White and Grey: Ethics in South African Journalism, Double Storey, Cape Town, 2004, p. 22-24
38. See statements by the South African National Editors’ Forum and Freedom of Expression Institute.
39. Bryson, Donna. “ANC forces South African President Mbeki to resign,” The Associated Press, Sept. 20, 2008
40. Bryson, Donna, “South African prosecutors to appeal Zuma ruling.” The Associated Press, Sept. 17, 2008
42. Ntuli, Dingilizwe, interview with the author, by telephone from South Africa, Oct. 13, 2008
43. Ntuli and Haffajee interviews
45. Harber, Anton, “Reflections on Journalism in the Transition to Democracy,” Ethics & International Affairs, Vol. 18, No. 3, 2004, p. 79
Works Cited
“Agreement Between the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) and the Two Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) Formations, on resolving the challenges facing Zimbabwe,” Article 19, Sept. 15, 2008 http://swradioafrica.com/pages/fultext160908.htm
Bryson, Donna, “ANC forces South African President Mbeki to resign,” The Associated Press, Sept. 20, 2008
Bryson, Donna, “South African prosecutors to appeal Zuma ruling,” The Associated Press, Sept. 17, 2008
Bryson, Donna, “Zimbabwe opposition: 113 members killed since March,” The Associated Press, July 11, 2008
Committee to Protect Journalists, “Attacks on the Press in 2007,” http://cpj.org/attacks07/africa07/zim07.html
Committee to Protect Journalists, “News Distributors Beaten in Zimbabwe; Papers Burned,” May 27, 2008 http://cpj.org/news/2008/africa/zim27may08na.html
Harber, Anton, “Reflections on Journalism in the Transition to Democracy,” Ethics & International Affairs, Vol. 18, No. 3, 2004
Kruger, Franz, Black, White and Grey: Ethics in South African Journalism, Double Storey, Cape Town, 2004
Mbanga, Wilf, “Zimbabwe: Telling the Story, Reporting the News,” Nieman Reports, Harvard, Fall 2008 http://nieman.harvard.edu/reportsitem.aspx?id=100420
“MDC Seeks New Zimbabwe Election,” The BBC online, Oct. 21, 2008 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7681468.stm
Nullis, Clare, “UN donates 2,000 tents for foreigners displaced by xenophobic attacks in South Africa,” The Associated Press, May 30, 2008
Odula, Tom, “Commission: Kenya should form a tribunal to try perpetrators of election violence,” The Associated Press, Oct. 15, 2008
Reporters Without Borders, International Media Support and Article 19, “How far to go? Kenya’s media caught in the turmoil of a failed election,” March 3, 2008
Ronning, Helge, “African Journalism and the Struggle for Democratic Media,” in Making Journalists:Diverse Models, Global Issues, edited by Hugo de Burgh, Routledge, London and New York, 2005
UNDP Human Development Report, 2002, “Deepening Democracy in a Fragmented World” http://hdr.undp.org/en/media/HDR_2002_EN_Overview.pdf
UNESCO, “Geoffrey Nyarota of Zimbabwe Awarded World Press Freedom Prize 2002,” http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=1869&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19, http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html
World Food Programme, “Major food appeal for Zimbabwe…” Oct. 9, 2008
Zhangazha, Takura, “Power sharing: Public hope and necessity of reforming state media,” Media Institute of Southern Africa — Zimbabwe, http://www.misazim.co.zw/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=345&Itemid=1
“Zimbabwe: President to Meet MDC Leaders,” The Herald, Oct. 10, 2008 http://allafrica.com/stories/200810100008.html
Interviews by author
Amin, Salim, interview with the author, by telephone from Kenya, Oct. 15, 2008
Haffajee, Ferial, interview with the author, by telephone from South Africa, Oct. 13, 2008
Jackson, Gerry, interview with the author, by telephone from Britain, Oct. 9, 2008
Mbanga, Wilf, interview by the author, in person, in Britain, July 8, 2005
Ntuli, Dingilizwe, interview with the author, by telephone from South Africa, Oct. 13, 2008
Wolters, Stephanie, interview with the author, by telephone from South Africa, Oct. 10, 2008
