AFRICAN MEDIA SYSTEM

INTRODUCTION:
Mass media in Africa have undergone tremendous changes in the last decade. Over the past 15 to 20 years, there has been notable progress and a significant shift towards democratization and media diversity in Africa. A UN report in 2006 states that mainstream, alternative and new forms of media, such as community and privately owned commercial media have steadily emerged and grown in numbers and diversity of opinion. The report suggests that the growth is in large part due to the space created by the shift from dictorial regimes to multiparty democracies and elections as well as the end of the cold war and internal calls for democratic reforms. In many African countries, as the new media entities have emerged, state-owned media, equally important for the public interest, has stagnated in the face of competition and diversity.

THE MEDIA SYSTEM:
For a close to a decade, the Highway Africa initiative, an annual collaboration between Rhodes University in South Africa, the private sector and development partners to showcase and promote new media, has helped engender a new breed of networked, multimedia-savvy African journalists. In recent years the digital era, and with it the convergence of new technologies with traditional/conventional media have raised critical policy questions on conventional regulatory telecommunications frameworks that lag behind new and emerging technologies. With access to new technologies and with improved bandwidth and internet infrastructure, ordinary citizens can bypass the hurdles of access to frequencies and licenses by appropriating digital or video cameras and audio players to publish, podcast, vodcast or stream stories on independent internet blogs. The digital age and the rapid development of the Internet have also challenged the traditional definition of journalism, forcing the mainstream or mass media to adapt or face extinction. Citizen journalism, including the generation of news content and analysis by individuals and independent groups of citizens worldwide, is an important dimension of this emerging phenomenon. Of all the media, newspapers remain the most combative and aggressive in their efforts to develop editorial independence, open up the society, and make themselves relevant.
A number of challenges stand in the way of a strong media sector in Africa. Sustainability emerges as an overarching concern common to all media actors, irrespective of type. Of particular concern is financial sustainability. In many African countries the market for commercial media products is thin, manifested by a weak subscription and advertiser base. Where such markets do exist, the concentration is overwhelmingly urban and to a lesser extent peri-urban. Rural dwellers must rely largely on alternative and community-focused media, where they exist. There is an overall deficit of investment. Media owners and entrepreneurs have little or no dedicated means of support, as a result of which media is unevenly developed, within and across countries. In the short term, consistent and coherent financing is required to address this concern. A longer-term challenge is how to graduate from reliance on donor funding, to full sustainability. Press freedom remains a significant challenge. The collapse of the state monopoly on media in the 1990s notwithstanding, the growth of independent media has been circumscribed by state efforts to claw back power. In many countries, journalists and communicators are not allowed to operate freely, and intimidation and censorship remain the order of the day. The spectre of journalists threatened, jailed and even killed in the course of doing their jobs remains too common a scenario. Often, economic imperatives and political alignments make nonsense of the media’s role as a guardian of the public sphere. Some state-controlled media continue to serve as propagandists, ensuring that only prescribed messages are released. The same phenomenon of crowding out space applies to the private media, with concentration of media ownership threatening pluralism. Moreover, the dearth of public media in Africa raises concern that serving the public interest rests solely on the shoulders of state and private media, both of which have overriding concerns – such as serving ruling elites and ensuring financial sustainability.
Capacity and standards are also identified as a major concern. In recent decades, donors have supported media training aimed at individuals and, to a lesser extent, organizations. However, the conventional wisdom is that such training has been piecemeal, small-scale and inimical to institution-building of the kind that is needed to sustain media as a sector. Producing content of a consistently high quality that is accurate and reliable requires a stronger configuration of training providers and a clear vision as to how to develop media capacity in different countries and subregions, all with their own specific characteristics and realities. Media management and entrepreneurial skills, as well as skills to strengthen media representation, also need to be developed with the same holistic approach in mind.
The emergence and development of Information and Communication technologies and especially the Internet has brought in its wake hope of increased exchanges between people geographically separated, dreams of economic prosperity, a new sense of interconnectedness and the optimistic belief in development and change even in the lives of Africans.
Mass media in Africa have undergone tremendous changes in the last decade. The monopoly by government has been broken. Radio and television are improving and are gradually becoming powerful instruments for public information and education. However, despite progress made, mass media in Africa remains constrained by acute problems including a lack of financial, human and material resources. These constraints could have a profound impact on the possibility of the African media to create public spheres for democratic participation.
Today’s Africa’s media picture is mixed. On one hand there is the example of South Africa whose largely professional media is of a high standard. On the other hand countries like Zimbabwe, Equatorial Guinea and Eritrea have taken deliberate steps to limit all media scrutiny, reportedly “expelling foreign journalists, banning international human rights groups, and trying to control Internet access”. Rwanda, Gabon and Ethiopia have demonstrated similar tendencies. At the same time, security remains a major issue for journalists working in countries like Somalia, the Central African Republic (CAR), Nigeria, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), although statistically journalists in Africa are less at risk than those working in the Middle East and Latin America.
The fact is that the dream of a robust, independent, indigenous continent-wide African mass media is still far from becoming reality. There have been signs of improvement, and some commentators have perceived real and lasting change, suggesting, for example, that “what was once a media desert has become a landscape flourishing with newspapers, radio and TV stations”. Many national governments have demonstrated reluctance to allow the development of an effective “fourth estate”. Other concerns persist. For example, even where African television stations are relatively free of political interference, they typically use very little local material; other than clumsily-produced news and some entertainment programming, conspicuous dependence on Western programming is common. Funding also remains a key issue for many media outlets in Africa; failure rates for financial reasons are high. In the realm of indigenous Pan-African media, pickings are slim.