Africa is littered with examples of adversarial relationships between the media and the ruling elite. However, the Ghanaian experience is instructive in that the first president of a free Ghana was himself a writer and a journalist before he took over the reins of government.
Kwame Nkrumah became, and remains, an inspiration to many freedom-loving Africans. Before he became president of his native country, he was an ardent campaigner for media freedom, which is why one is tempted to invoke the Ghanaian narrative in analysing what is being proposed in South Africa.
Ghana faced precisely the same dilemma that South Africa is likely to face, shortly after independence in 1957.
At that time, the biggest newspaper in the country was the Daily Graphic, which was set up in 1950 by the Daily Mirror Group in London. It was suspected of collaboration with the colonial administration by the leaders of our anti-colonial struggle, grouped around Nkrumah in the Convention People's Party (CPP).
Nkrumah had his own papers - the Accra Evening News and the Cape Coast Daily Mail. These sold like hot cakes, though they were produced on flatbed machines and looked amateurish. But the writing was incisive and always had the same target: "What in hell's name were khaki-wearing white men in pith helmets doing in our country?" Under the masthead were three fiery words: "Self-government now!"
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, had used it to imprison Nkrumah for three years.
That marked the beginning of the end of British rule in Ghana. Strikes, looting of foreign-owned shops and subtle noncooperation occurred, and in desperation, the British held a general election under universal adult suffrage.
Nkrumah was allowed to stand, and from his jail cell obtained the highest number of votes. The British immediately released him and made him "leader of government business" in the new legislature. …
Copyright, Blaise APLOGAN, 2010,© Bienvenu sur Babilown
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