Unity Radio, a station run by the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP), was on May 8, 2008 shut down on the orders of the Minister of Information and Communication, Alhaji Ibrahim Ben Kargbo. Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA)’s correspondent reported that the closure according to Kargbo, was due to the installation of an illegal antenna which disturbed the transmission of other radio stations, and the fact that SLPP did not go through the right procedures to register Unity Radio.

The Africa Freedom of Information Centre (AFIC) welcomes the steps taken by Liberia to adopt a Freedom of Information law for the country and calls on the National Legislature to expedite action in passing the Freedom of Information Bill submitted to it last month by a coalition of ordinary citizens, media and civil society organizations.

I cannot agree with Armele Choplin that "Mauritania is awash with Maghrebin extremists whose influence continues to grow" (Mauritania: Between Islamism and terrorrism; ). The attack on French tourists in December 2007 was claimed as the work of organised terrorists operating from Algeria, but this was never proven.

There is much alarmist talk of Al Qaeda in the Sahel, which has been used to justify a significant US presence and involvement in the region. It was, incidentally, a supposed fear of links with Al Qaeda that led the US to promote and support the invasion of Somalia, to crush the Islamic Courts Union there.

Certainly, the continued poverty of the ordinary Mauritanian people, in the face of growing oil revenues and a government which so far, despite its promises, has failed to ensure any significant re-distribution of wealth or mprovement in basic welfare, has led to a degree of radicalisation. So-called 'food riots' reveal how far ordinary people are angered by the failure of the new elected government to assure its people's well being, as well as being hard hit by rising food prices and continued poverty.

The implied 'social contract' in a democracy - that the people elect the government to ensure their wellbeing - has been broken yet again. Islam offers hope to young people, especially, as Armell Choplin rightly points out, to young harratin, and it also focuses the anger and disappointment. But this has nothing to do with terrorism and more to do with popular protest at government failure.

Egyptian authorities should immediately investigate and prosecute those security officials responsible for beating Ahmed Maher Ibrahim, Human Rights Watch have said. Maher, a 27-year-old civil engineer, used the social-networking site Facebook to support calls for a general strike on May 4, 2008, President Hosni Mubarak’s 80th birthday.

Tajudeen Abdul Raheem asks the question: Do we expect too much from the media when we ourselves are failing African societies?

May 3 was International Press Freedom Day. Journalists make their living by poking their noses into other people’s affairs but are not very good at looking at themselves, their institutions, their own practice and how they advance or hinder the values of freedom of expression that their profession is built on.

I was at the Goethe Institute in the City of Nairobi to hear journalists celebrate the day and talk about the various challenges facing the Media in Kenya. A very interesting documentary film ‘Uncovering Kenya Media’ produced by one of Kenya’s veteran Pan Africanist photojournalists, Khamis Ramadan was screened. The film looked at the unsung contributions of photojournalists. In general African journalists are badly paid and ill treated by their employers, governments and the wider society.

But photojournalists are even more badly treated because media houses and the wider society do not recognise their real value. In Africa they are still seen as poor cousins of the ‘main stream’. Yet in this age of multimedia the image is increasingly more important than the written word. What people can see or hear are more believable than what they can read. How many times have you heard people affirm the truth of their position by saying: ‘I saw it on telly’ or ‘I saw the pictures with my own eyes’? These are more validating than even ‘I heard it with my ears’ that used to put stamp of authority on radio. In the order of things ‘I read it’ is less affirming because many people still can neither read nor write. And even among those who are ‘literate’ many will read more ‘pictures’ than the text!

The film was both a celebration of the media and also an auto-critique by practitioners. There was a sad illustration of both the courage and danger of being a working journalist in Kenya is the case of journalist who was handicapped escaping Police arrest in the bloody days of Moi/KANU dictatorship and was bedridden for many years. He died after the film was concluded. It raises the question of how those in power treat the media but it is also about how journalists treat one of their own.

Kenyan media has seen a rebirth in the past few years where acts of courage and hope triumph over adversity. But the political glasnost in the post Moi era has its own dangers and as the society became more polarised the media itself is caught up in the conflicts. It is not just an impartial reporter but also active partisans.

There was a very interesting exchange of views after the film. Sometimes the exchanges were recriminatory, at times heated and impassioned but mostly educative throughout. The discussions were led by an impressive panel of experienced media persons including my UN Millennium Campaign colleague, Sylvia Mudasia, who in a previous life was a frontline journalist in both Kenya Times and The Nation and also David Matende (Editor/Publisher), Mitch Odera (Editor/Media Trainer) and Kabando wa Kabando, an MP and Assistant Minister in the Grand Coalition government.

Most of the interventions, understandably, focused on the role of the media in the recent political conflicts and violence that unfolded in Kenya consequent to the inconclusive nature of the Presidential elections and its mismanagement by the Kenya Electoral Commission. There were all kinds of questions and even more comments. There was a set directed at the role of the media in the recent conflicts. Did the media foresee the calamity? Could they have done anything to avert it? Did they contribute to it? Did they fan the embers of ethnicity and xenophobia?

Another set of questions and comments were about the professional role of the Media. Is the media free in Kenya? Is it performing according to the highest of professional core values? Is it controlled by the powerful? Is it too beholden to the rich and other vested interests? Is it cowed by government? Does the public trust it? Does it reflect the truth?

There were as many people on either side of these questions as there were people in the audience and all argued their cases passionately.

What I found very interesting is the assumption implied in all the condemnations, criticisms or praises of the media that we expect the media to be above conflicts, prejudices, sectarianism and partisanship in its discharge of its functions. Yet the journalist, the TV or Radio producer, the radio announcer, the anchor woman or man, the photographer, the subeditor, the editor, including this columnist and other columnists are all human beings and living in the same environment as their readers, listeners or viewers.

In any polarised society would it not be expecting too much to believe that the media will not be part of it? They are also citizens and being in the media should not deny them the right to political participation. What can be legitimately expected is for the media to discharge its duties in as non-partisan way as possible.

As for being political we are all political whether we state so openly or not. Even when many feign lack of interest in politics it does not mean that they do not have a political position. Not having a position is also a political position! Politics affects you whether you are interested in it or not. The Media is both a source of information and disinformation depending on the social, ideological or political perspectives of the persons involved. Objectivity itself is an inter-subjective process mediated by education, skill, personal integrity or lack of it, values, cultural norms, and the power relations between the journalist and his or her employers and between them and the powerful in society be they government, corporate leaders, advertisers, their audience, etc.

If we are not angels ourselves, it is unrealistic to expect that our media will be peopled by saints because like governments a people get the media they deserve. They report as much as they reflect their society and the world around them, its contradictions, its highest and lowest of values and sometimes the plainly mediocre.

The election conflicts exposed the various fissures in Kenya long neglected by a self satisfied elite and complacent public. It is not only media that should engage in retrospection about its role in the conflict. The whole of Kenya needs the honesty to confront their not so hidden but conveniently ignored socio-economic and political demons. No institution is neutral. The religious establishments failed woefully in its moral duty to speak truth to power.

But they were not alone as many leaders in the arts, academia, professional associations, the NGOs/ CSOs, and respected public intellectuals failed the same moral test. It is convenient to blame the media but every Kenyan and to some extent all of us who live in the country need to ask where we stood / stand on the issues that divided / divide the country. Are you part of the problem or part of the solution?

*Dr Tajudeen Abdul Raheem writes this syndicated column as a concerned Pan Africanist.

**Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

The David Astor Journalism Awards Trust (DAJAT) is inviting nominations for its second round of professional development awards. The deadline is 30th May 2008. DAJAT searches for exceptionally promising and talented early-career East African print journalists working in English who have great potential and determination to excel in the profession, invests in their long-term career development, and aims to build an enduring peer-support network to promote strong independent journalism in the region.

TransAfrica Forum calls on the Government of Zimbabwe to immediately release jailed leaders of the Zimbabwe Coalition of Trade Unions, Lovemore Matombo and Secretary General Wellington Chibebe. The two were arrested on May 8 and charged with allegations of "inciting people to rise against the government," following speeches made during a May Day rally.

One of the country’s top lawyers, Harrison Nkomo, was arrested by police on Wednesday for allegedly insulting Robert Mugabe. Nkomo who was representing arrested freelance journalist Frank Chikowore at the High Court, is alleged to have told Michael Mugabe, a law officer in the Attorney General’s office, to ‘go and tell your father that he must vacate office because he has failed.’

The United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) and Hewlett-Packard (HP) have joined forces to help young unemployed people across Africa build their entrepreneurial and information technology (IT) skills.

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has called on the members of Nigeria's House of Representatives to stop delaying the passage of the Freedom of Information (FOI) Bill after its consideration was deferred for the fifth time last week.

With unique readers growing by 190 percent over the past year, Engineering News has been named by Nielson Online as South Africa’s fastest growing website. The publication’s sister sites, Mining Weekly and Polity, occupied the second and fourth places respectively. All three of the sites were moved onto an open source software platform a year ago.

The tussle between governments and the media over what the public should know have been raging for several years not only in Africa, but across the globe. Governments react to media footage by closing down the media offices, conducting raids on the premises, beating up journalists, shooting or jailing journalists.

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/368/47869hospital.jpgAs the people of Equatorial Guinea continue to die from AIDS and other diseases, Agustin Velloso highlights the fact that the elite in power receive their medical care abroad. Spain, one of the country's more important trading partners, turns a blind eye to Equatorial Guinea's corrupt health-care industry.

In Madrid at the end of October 2007, President Zapatero promised to give 0.7% of GDP for development aid during workshops promoted by the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID) and presided over by Queen Sofía. As he did so, a boy we can call Miguel, sick with AIDS in Equatorial Guinea, lay dying in his mother's arms in the hospital in Malabo, the country's capital.

One of the objectives of the AECID is to train doctors in Equatorial Guinea to treat AIDS and to advise their clinical work with AIDS patients. So one is not dealing with witchdoctors here but doctors trained by the AECID. Yet they gave Miguel an extract of tree bark rather than the internationally recognised treatment, antiretrovirals. Antiretrovirals are available in Equatorial Guinea; international agencies donate them.

The reason Miguel did not receive the right treatment is corruption by the people responsible for caring for his health. According to ASODEGUE, the Association for Democratic Solidarity with Equatorial Guinea, the prime minister called a meeting several months ago of the national coordinators of the campaign against AIDS and of international agencies working in the country. Among them were delegates from the World Health Organisation (WHO) and AECID's experts who advise Equatorial Guinea's health ministry. A niece of President Obiang also took part. She is not a doctor but a businesswoman. She presented the meeting's participants with a project to produce the bark extract (called Fagaricine) to market as an AIDS treatment. She also asked their opinion about the project.

In its January 2008 Republic of Congo WHO Office Information Bulletin, the WHO notes ‘Fagaricine is not an AIDS drug’[1]. Whatever the experts’ opinion may have been, a tragedy took place shortly afterwards when a group of patients, including Miguel, attended their routine appointments in Malabo hospital to collect their antiretrovirals. Instead, they received Fagaricine. This group of guinea pigs included children and adults and at least one expectant mother. No explanation was given; most of the people did not even know.

The group soon began to get worse. Some died. The population became concerned. Despite foreign aid and government propaganda, AIDS treatment in the country is a disaster. Fagaricine is currently no longer prescribed in Malabo hospital but it is still sold in a few pharmacies.

Meanwhile, Obiang and his circle receive their medical care abroad. Some pay astronomical bills in private clinics in the United States, while others are treated for free in Spain's public hospitals. At the same time private clinics flourish in Equatorial Guinea, but only the very well-off can afford their services. President Obiang's wife owns several of them; most have his family members as partners.

The government is unable to provide health care to the population. As opposition leader Plácido Mico noted at the National Economic Conference in November 2007 ‘the health care situation in Equatorial Guinea, a multimillionaire country, is without doubt the best example of our deep inequalities, injustices and social exclusion, as is the distribution of wealth in the country. Apart from Mongomo, no general hospital in the country permits even a straightforward x-ray.’ [2]

Equatorial Guinea is one of the main producers of oil and gas in Africa and has been a most favoured beneficiary of technical and economic aid from Spain for decades. The AECID implements its health work there ‘via various projects with one common denominator: the formation of a framework permitting the institution building of the National Health System’. One of these projects, the control of endemic diseases, is carried out for AECID by Spanish state bodies – the National Centre of Tropical Medicine and the Carlos the Third Health Institute. With formidable funding they aim ‘to achieve the training and improvement in operative capacity of local technical personnel in the Health System and in the National Programmes’[3]. The main endemic disease is AIDS.

The argument used by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and Cooperation in Equatorial Guinea to justify their expenditure is that it is being used to build ‘local capacity’ for each of the ‘National Programmes’.

Tuberculosis and AIDS are allowed to get out of control while discriminatory laws are issued against people who are HIV positive, such as Presidential Decree No. 107/2006 of 20 November 2007, which ordains ‘the requirement of an HIV/AIDS test certificate in order to obtain certain public services’.

During the recent electoral campaign in Spain, María Teresa Fernández de la Vega, the Spanish government's First Vice-President and Presidency Minister, promised, alongside Miguel Angel Moratinos, Minister for Foreign Affairs and Cooperation, and Leire Pajín, Secretary of State for International Cooperation, that Spain would ‘make history in the next four years’ and be ‘a leader in solidarity’. She also stressed that Spanish socialists believe in politics ‘as a means to make the world a better place’ and that, since we are the eighth biggest economy in the world ‘we have to take on the responsibility demanded by our place on the world stage’.[3]

Despite the sonorous propaganda about international aid, more resounding still is the silence about the Obiang family's corruption and the consequences of Spanish development cooperation in Equatorial Guinea.

*Agustín Velloso is professor of education sciences at the National University of Education in Madrid. This article was translated by Toni Solo, an activist living in Nicaragua.

**Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

*** For notes and references please click here

Mobile technology is transforming the way advocacy, development and relief organizations accomplish their institutional missions. This is nothing new to readers of MobileActive. Our recent report Wireless Technology for Social Change: Trends in NGO Mobile Use, just released by the United Nations Foundation and The Vodafone Group Foundation, brings this point home.

Along the Nakuru-Eldoret road, the charred remains of homes and businesses scar the picturesque landscape of Kenya's Rift Valley province and serve as a reminder of two months of violence that rocked the nation early this year. The calm that is typical of most rural settings belies the suffering experienced by thousands of internally displaced persons (IDPs) since fleeing their homes in January and February.

Uganda Telecom has started work on a fiber-optic link from the western town of Mbarara in Uganda to the Rwanda border-crossing point at Katuna - essentially giving a major boost to the long-awaited regional fibre project. When completed in November this year, a significant section of what has come to be known as the East African Backhaul System (EABS) will be in place, giving Uganda end-to-end fiber coverage, the telecommunications news outlet IDG News Service reported on Monday.

African universities are crucial to the future development of the Internet on the continent in two ways. Firstly, they contain one of the largest groups of existing and potential users: today’s student user is tomorrow’s future decision-maker. Secondly, universities should be generators of content that will be used by the same students to increase their knowledge and skills. The Kenyan Government and Google have both said they want to provide free Internet connectivity to students.

Reporters Without Borders condemns Thursday’s arrest of freelance journalist Precious Shumba in a police raid on the Harare office of the international aid NGO ActionAid, where Shumba works as a programmes officer. A reporter for The Daily News until it was forced to close, he is the 10th journalist to be arrested since the general elections.

This week, the capital of Burkina Faso, Ouagadougou hosted the second annual “Africa ICT Best Practice Forum” which serves as a practical way for Governments from across Africa to share their own experiences and demonstrate practical examples of successful technology solutions in their respective countries. It attracted a large crowd of Ministers and civil servants from all over Africa and was held in at the same time as Burkina Faso’s national Internet week and the local ICT event SITICI.

As the recount process for the parliamentary elections confirm the victory of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), the party's rival factions announced on Monday that they had reunited. This gives the opposition a comfortable majority in the parliament.