Africa

2010

  

Somaliland obstructs UK satellite station

New York, October 7, 2010–Authorities in Somaliland should immediately lift a suspension order imposed against the UK-based satellite broadcaster Universal TV, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. The order bars the station’s correspondents from reporting in the breakaway republic in northern Somalia, Khadar Mahamed, Universal TV senior newscaster and producer, told CPJ.

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Nigerian police officer stands at scen of an exploded car bomb at Eagle Square in Abuja. (AP)

Abuja Twitterers chronicle #Nigeriaat50 bomb explosions

A few minutes before deadly explosions ripped through Nigeria’s 50th Independence Day celebration in Abuja on Saturday, Twitter user Achonu Stanley wondered about darkening skies over the festivities: “Would the day be marred by rain? It has become cloudy and dark. Sorry for the thousands of people at Eagle Square.”

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Former CBS journalists Ndiwalana Kiwanuka, left, Richard Wasswa and Joesph Kafumbe. (CPJ)

Ugandan station still closed, an ill omen for election

More than a year has passed since the government-influenced Broadcasting Council summarily closed the popular Central Broadcasting Service, or CBS. The council closed the station in September 2009 as riots were erupting in response to the government’s decision to block the traditional Buganda king from attending a youth celebration north of the capital, Kampala. Its…

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Jammeh may be a Nebraska "admiral," but he was not commended by Obama. (Reuters)

Jammeh ‘award’ coverage reflects chill in Gambian press

“President Jammeh bags 4 awards,” trumpeted a September 17 headline of the Daily Observer, a pro-government newspaper in the Gambia, a West African nation whose idyllic façade as “the smiling coast of Africa” is maintained in part by President Yahyah Jammeh’s brutal repression of the independent press. 

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Uganda's Yoweri Museveni, left, South Africa's Jacob Zuma, and Nigeria's Goodluck Jonathan at this summer's African Union Summit in Kampala. (AFP/Marc Hofer)

With media plan, ANC copies Nigeria’s military rulers

While South Africa’s ruling African National Congress (ANC) discusses the party’s proposal for a media appeals tribunal, delegates should take note of a landmark ruling in Nigeria this year in which a High Court judge declared a government-dominated press council unconstitutional. 

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Choice is important, Zenawi says. But editors back home are not always free to make their own choices.

As Zenawi speaks, editors are grilled in Ethiopia

On Wednesday, just a few hours before Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi delivered the keynote address at the World Leaders’ Forum at New York’s Columbia University, two journalists back in Addis Ababa endured nearly seven hours of police interrogation. 

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Dasar (Clifford Derrick)

Somali journalist lives under threat, in fear in South Africa

Violence has cut through the life of 28-year-old journalist Abdulahi Ibrahim Dasar, from his high school days in Kismayo, the third-largest city in Somalia, to his life as a refugee in South Africa. The turbulence of Dasar’s life also explains his entry into journalism, a profession that has made him a target of assassination by…

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New Vision

Second journalist killed in three days in Uganda

New York, September 15, 2010–Unidentified assailants beat and killed news presenter Dickson Ssentongo Monday morning on his way to work at Prime Radio in Mukono district, central Uganda. Assailants beat Ssentongo with metal bars and dragged him into a nearby cassava field, local journalists told CPJ. He was the second journalist murdered in three days…

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President Khama has not been a friend to the media. (Reuters)

Why South Africa’s media fight matters to Botswana

For Batswana journalists, news that their South African colleagues are busy warding off a proposed statutory media tribunal from the ruling African National Congress sounds all too familiar. For more than a decade, the government of Botswana has been trying to push a media law that would effectively shift the whole media under state control.This was eventually…

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A journalist films an insurgent in Somalia. (Mohammed Ibrahim)

‘A Somali journalist’s life is short anyways’

In August, Shabelle Media Network, one of Somalia’s leading independent broadcasters, did something incredibly brave–they rebroadcast news and music that the BBC’s Somali-language service beams to the war-torn Horn of African nation in defiance of a ban imposed by hard-line militant Islamist rebel groups Al-Shabaab and Hizbul Islam. For Somali journalists, who risk death by crossfire and assassination, and censorship from both…

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2010