An acrimonious debate is raging in South Africa right now over what the relationship between the media and the Government should be.
Some members of the ANC government are clearly fed up with what they consider to be the constant carping of the private press over alleged governmental corruption and incompetence.
The remedy the Government has proposed is a Media Tribunal law that will seek to adjudicate over, and thereby regulate, reports by the media which cause displeasure in official circles.
Even worse, there is a proposal to make it a criminal offence, punishable by a long term of imprisonment, the publication of information the Government considers secret.
The media practitioners of South Africa are naturally up in arms against the signals the Government is sending that it wants to control the media.
South Africa‘s majority-rule constitution, which has been acclaimed the world over as one of the most enlightened of the 20th century will probably have to be amended to achieve the government‘s aims.
Fortunately, the Government and the journalists are now talking, and it appears as if the “dialogue of the deaf” that was occurring between the two sides, may be terminated to mutual advantage.
Of course, the media never operates in a vacuum. Questions like who owns what media, the background -- and type -- of journalists that owners set out to employ and sustain, all influence the output of the media.
It is therefore essential that in a democracy, ingenious ways should be found to balance any “special interests” that may be pursued by the media, against the “public interest” that the elected government of the day claims it wants to pursue.
It is not an easy balance to strike, and the outcome often determines the course that is taken by the subsequent political development of a country.
To me, the South African debate provides an eerie sense of déjà vu. Ghana faced precisely the same dilemma almost immediately after its independence in March 1957.
At that time, the biggest newspaper in the country was foreign-owned. It was the Daily Graphic, which was set up in 1950 by the Daily Mirror Group in London.
It was produced to attractive British tabloid standards and was so popular that when I was in Standard Five at Kyebi Government School, I used part of my rent and chop-money to take a subscription, at the UAC store, which was the distributor. My copy had a number written in ink on it, and it was pleasurable to know that no matter how late I got to the shop, it would be there waiting for me.
It was a major sacrifice for a 14-year-old schoolboy to make, but it meant I was exposed to good journalism at a very early age. So I only half-regret the fact that I had to deny myself an enormous quantity of delicious suya (kebab) that I could have picked up red-hot from the charcoal stove of the “dekyee” (butcher/kebab-maker) who operated at Kyebi market, and spent it on a newspaper instead.
I was repaid handsomely, for the Graphic had some excellent writers in those days. Its star columnists were Moses Danquah and Bankole Timothy, later to be joined by “Carl Mutt” (Henry Ofori) who was the first writer to introduce the humorous column into Ghanaian journalism. It was also very strong in sports reporting, with Kofi Badu and others providing excellent fare for football-lovers.
Unfortunately, the enthusiasm with which the populace greeted the Graphic was not the same as that accorded to it by the politicians who were trying to wrest power out of the hands of the British.
Because of its foreign-ownership, the Graphic could not win: on the one hand, it was suspected of collaboration with the colonial administration by the leaders of our anti-colonial struggle, grouped around Dr Kwame Nkrumah in the Convention People’s Party (CPP).
On the other hand, Nkrumah’s United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC) opponents suspected the Graphic of bending over backwards to flatter the new men who were taking power out of the hands of the British.
The political parties all had their own papers, but none could compete with the rotary-press produced Graphic, in terms of circulation.
Nkrumah’s papers were flatbed sheets called the Accra Evenings News and the Cape Coast Daily Mail. The UGCC guys had the “Daily Echo” (or ’Daily Echor’, as some of the newspaper hawkers who shouted its name loudly on the streets of Accra called it) and the much more musically-touted “Spectator Dayleeeee.”
These papers all sold pretty well to their individual constituencies. Although their printing was generally poor, the papers exhibited great skill: I remember a two-line strap column entitled “Saladin wishes to Know”, in which the writer threw political rumour after political rumour at the colonial administration and dared it to confirm or deny it.
Nkrumah’s Evening News and Cape Coast Daily Mail unabashedly had only one theme: what in hell’s name were khaki-wearing whitemen in pith-helmets doing in our country? Under their mastheads, to emphasise what they were demanding -- in case anyone had a doubt about it -- were three self-explanatory words: “Self-government Now!”
Conflicts between these newspapers and the authorities of the day were inevitable. An issue of the Cape Coast Daily Mail so incensed the colonial authorities in 1950 that they passed a sedition bill, and within two days of doing that, used it to imprison the paper’s publisher, Dr Kwame Nkrumah, for three years. (It’s amazing that they felt the need for a new law at all to deal with Nkrumah, since they had enough repressive laws on the statute book already.
For instance, some years earlier, they had used the sedition laws to jail the future Nigerian President, Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, who was editor-in-chief of the African Morning Post in Accra from 1934 to 1937. His offence? An article in which he asked: “Has The African God?”)
The imprisonment of Nkrumah for publishing his opinions exposed the British --self-proclaimed “champions of democracy” -- to charges of hypocrisy. And the strikes and looting of foreign-owned shops that had begun with the Ex-Servicemen’s anti-colonial protests in 1948, intensified. In desperation, the British enacted a new constitution for the country, and held a general election under it, using universal adult suffrage.
Nkrumah was allowed to stand in the election, and it did his personal mystique no harm at all when, although unable to campaign from his jail cell, his lieutenants, led by the uncanny Komla Gbedemah, made sure that he obtained the single highest number of votes cast for any candidate in the whole of the Gold Coast.
The British thereupon did an immediate flip-flop: they released Nkrumah from prison within hours of the election result becoming known. Not only that -- they created a brand new grandiose post for him: ‘Leader of Government Business’’ -- he being in command of the majority of seats in the new legislature.
Independence for Ghana followed six years later.
Thus it was that in 1957, Nkrumah attended his first Commonwealth heads of government conference in London, sitting at the same table as Eric Louw, Foreign Minister of apartheid South Africa and Roy Welensky, prime minister of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland -- representatives of two racist regimes in Southern Africa, which preached that Africans were, with few exceptions, not even fit to vote, let alone hold the reins of government.
The photographs that emanated from that Commonwealth conference, which went round the world, foretold the end of racist regimes in Africa.
But at home, Nkrumah had been undermining his own image as a the personification of the Blackman’s demand for one man one vote and democracy for all, by tampering seriously with the democratic institutions that had brought him to power.
When he proposed to put his effigy on new coins to be minted for the country, a columnist of the Daily Graphic, Bankole Timothy, wickedly teased him with an article entitled, “What next, Kwame?” Nkrumah was not amused: Timothy was deported to his home country, Sierra Leone, immediately.
Even Bankole Timothy’s own Daily Mirror Group refused to stand by his freedom to write what he thought, in case they annoyed Nkrumah and risked the paper’s future.
The Mirror Group chairman, Cecil King, gave a public lecture at the Accra YMCA at which he was asked to comment on the deportation of Bankole Timothy.
His terse answer, which astonished his audience, was this: “Mr Timothy was not deported in connection with his work at the Daily Graphic.”
This was an amazing show of contempt for Ghanaian public opinion: we all thought Timothy had been deported for what he wrote.
Yet Timothy’s own boss disputed that, though he would not give us what information he possessed that had led him to his contrary conclusion.
Some members of the ANC government are clearly fed up with what they consider to be the constant carping of the private press over alleged governmental corruption and incompetence.
The remedy the Government has proposed is a Media Tribunal law that will seek to adjudicate over, and thereby regulate, reports by the media which cause displeasure in official circles.
Even worse, there is a proposal to make it a criminal offence, punishable by a long term of imprisonment, the publication of information the Government considers secret.
The media practitioners of South Africa are naturally up in arms against the signals the Government is sending that it wants to control the media.
South Africa‘s majority-rule constitution, which has been acclaimed the world over as one of the most enlightened of the 20th century will probably have to be amended to achieve the government‘s aims.
Fortunately, the Government and the journalists are now talking, and it appears as if the “dialogue of the deaf” that was occurring between the two sides, may be terminated to mutual advantage.
Of course, the media never operates in a vacuum. Questions like who owns what media, the background -- and type -- of journalists that owners set out to employ and sustain, all influence the output of the media.
It is therefore essential that in a democracy, ingenious ways should be found to balance any “special interests” that may be pursued by the media, against the “public interest” that the elected government of the day claims it wants to pursue.
It is not an easy balance to strike, and the outcome often determines the course that is taken by the subsequent political development of a country.
To me, the South African debate provides an eerie sense of déjà vu. Ghana faced precisely the same dilemma almost immediately after its independence in March 1957.
At that time, the biggest newspaper in the country was foreign-owned. It was the Daily Graphic, which was set up in 1950 by the Daily Mirror Group in London.
It was produced to attractive British tabloid standards and was so popular that when I was in Standard Five at Kyebi Government School, I used part of my rent and chop-money to take a subscription, at the UAC store, which was the distributor. My copy had a number written in ink on it, and it was pleasurable to know that no matter how late I got to the shop, it would be there waiting for me.
It was a major sacrifice for a 14-year-old schoolboy to make, but it meant I was exposed to good journalism at a very early age. So I only half-regret the fact that I had to deny myself an enormous quantity of delicious suya (kebab) that I could have picked up red-hot from the charcoal stove of the “dekyee” (butcher/kebab-maker) who operated at Kyebi market, and spent it on a newspaper instead.
I was repaid handsomely, for the Graphic had some excellent writers in those days. Its star columnists were Moses Danquah and Bankole Timothy, later to be joined by “Carl Mutt” (Henry Ofori) who was the first writer to introduce the humorous column into Ghanaian journalism. It was also very strong in sports reporting, with Kofi Badu and others providing excellent fare for football-lovers.
Unfortunately, the enthusiasm with which the populace greeted the Graphic was not the same as that accorded to it by the politicians who were trying to wrest power out of the hands of the British.
Because of its foreign-ownership, the Graphic could not win: on the one hand, it was suspected of collaboration with the colonial administration by the leaders of our anti-colonial struggle, grouped around Dr Kwame Nkrumah in the Convention People’s Party (CPP).
On the other hand, Nkrumah’s United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC) opponents suspected the Graphic of bending over backwards to flatter the new men who were taking power out of the hands of the British.
The political parties all had their own papers, but none could compete with the rotary-press produced Graphic, in terms of circulation.
Nkrumah’s papers were flatbed sheets called the Accra Evenings News and the Cape Coast Daily Mail. The UGCC guys had the “Daily Echo” (or ’Daily Echor’, as some of the newspaper hawkers who shouted its name loudly on the streets of Accra called it) and the much more musically-touted “Spectator Dayleeeee.”
These papers all sold pretty well to their individual constituencies. Although their printing was generally poor, the papers exhibited great skill: I remember a two-line strap column entitled “Saladin wishes to Know”, in which the writer threw political rumour after political rumour at the colonial administration and dared it to confirm or deny it.
Nkrumah’s Evening News and Cape Coast Daily Mail unabashedly had only one theme: what in hell’s name were khaki-wearing whitemen in pith-helmets doing in our country? Under their mastheads, to emphasise what they were demanding -- in case anyone had a doubt about it -- were three self-explanatory words: “Self-government Now!”
Conflicts between these newspapers and the authorities of the day were inevitable. An issue of the Cape Coast Daily Mail so incensed the colonial authorities in 1950 that they passed a sedition bill, and within two days of doing that, used it to imprison the paper’s publisher, Dr Kwame Nkrumah, for three years. (It’s amazing that they felt the need for a new law at all to deal with Nkrumah, since they had enough repressive laws on the statute book already.
For instance, some years earlier, they had used the sedition laws to jail the future Nigerian President, Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, who was editor-in-chief of the African Morning Post in Accra from 1934 to 1937. His offence? An article in which he asked: “Has The African God?”)
The imprisonment of Nkrumah for publishing his opinions exposed the British --self-proclaimed “champions of democracy” -- to charges of hypocrisy. And the strikes and looting of foreign-owned shops that had begun with the Ex-Servicemen’s anti-colonial protests in 1948, intensified. In desperation, the British enacted a new constitution for the country, and held a general election under it, using universal adult suffrage.
Nkrumah was allowed to stand in the election, and it did his personal mystique no harm at all when, although unable to campaign from his jail cell, his lieutenants, led by the uncanny Komla Gbedemah, made sure that he obtained the single highest number of votes cast for any candidate in the whole of the Gold Coast.
The British thereupon did an immediate flip-flop: they released Nkrumah from prison within hours of the election result becoming known. Not only that -- they created a brand new grandiose post for him: ‘Leader of Government Business’’ -- he being in command of the majority of seats in the new legislature.
Independence for Ghana followed six years later.
Thus it was that in 1957, Nkrumah attended his first Commonwealth heads of government conference in London, sitting at the same table as Eric Louw, Foreign Minister of apartheid South Africa and Roy Welensky, prime minister of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland -- representatives of two racist regimes in Southern Africa, which preached that Africans were, with few exceptions, not even fit to vote, let alone hold the reins of government.
The photographs that emanated from that Commonwealth conference, which went round the world, foretold the end of racist regimes in Africa.
But at home, Nkrumah had been undermining his own image as a the personification of the Blackman’s demand for one man one vote and democracy for all, by tampering seriously with the democratic institutions that had brought him to power.
When he proposed to put his effigy on new coins to be minted for the country, a columnist of the Daily Graphic, Bankole Timothy, wickedly teased him with an article entitled, “What next, Kwame?” Nkrumah was not amused: Timothy was deported to his home country, Sierra Leone, immediately.
Even Bankole Timothy’s own Daily Mirror Group refused to stand by his freedom to write what he thought, in case they annoyed Nkrumah and risked the paper’s future.
The Mirror Group chairman, Cecil King, gave a public lecture at the Accra YMCA at which he was asked to comment on the deportation of Bankole Timothy.
His terse answer, which astonished his audience, was this: “Mr Timothy was not deported in connection with his work at the Daily Graphic.”
This was an amazing show of contempt for Ghanaian public opinion: we all thought Timothy had been deported for what he wrote.
Yet Timothy’s own boss disputed that, though he would not give us what information he possessed that had led him to his contrary conclusion.
