With confounding ease, President Omar Bongo maintained his smooth-talking, iron-fisted rule by suppressing critical media voices via the Penal Code and by simply purchasing good press. In January, the president appropriated 500 million francs (US$690,000) to support private media outlets, causing reporters to engage in embarrassing public squabbles over how to divvy up the bounty.
Throughout the year, Gambian journalists feared that authoritarian president Yahya Jammeh and his ruling Alliance for Patriotic Reorientation and Construction (APRC) would deal harshly with journalists ahead of the October presidential elections. To the surprise of many, these fears proved misplaced. However, repression resumed soon after President Jammeh won reelection. One journalist was subsequently arrested…
After John Agyekum Kufuor was sworn in as Ghana’s new president in January, he promised to make defamation a civil and not a criminal offense. On July 27, Ghana’s parliament unanimously repealed the country’s criminal libel and sedition laws, including clauses governing sedition and defamation of the president. Also scrapped were laws granting the president…
The popular opposition leader Alpha Conde was released in late March, after serving three years of a five-year sentence for allegedly endangering national security. Conde’s release raised expectations that political change was coming to Guinea. But President Lassana Conté, who has ruled the country for nearly two decades, saw matters differently, plotting tirelessly to strengthen…
The government of Guinea-Bissau remained paralyzed for most of the year following a split in the governing coalition that left the ruling Social Renewal Party (PRS) in the minority amid widespread allegations of official corruption and mismanagement. Unable to create stability in the country, President Kumba Yala resorted to an increasingly dictatorial style that pitted…
On January 8, President Laurent Gbagbo’s government thwarted an attempted coup by mercenaries whom the ruling Popular Front (FPI) accused of being in the pay of Burkina Faso and other countries bordering Côte d’Ivoire. The rebels occupied the compound of the official RTI broadcasting network and aired communiqués saying that the elected government had been…
Continuing a trend that began in 2000, high-ranking politicians and legislators–led by President Daniel arap Moi–brought several libel and defamation suits against the press last year. The judiciary responded by awarding record libel damages, introducing bankruptcy as a possible tool to silence critical media.
President Charles Taylor remains the single greatest threat to press freedom in Liberia. As global pressure mounted on his government to improve its bleak human rights record, Taylor responded with his usual mix of paranoia and brutality, jailing reporters for “espionage,” shutting down newspapers for unpaid taxes and imposing a news blackout on an armed…
Officials and ruling party supporters intensified a campaign of intimidation against critical voices in Malawi following revelations of widespread government corruption and amid growing speculation that President Bakili Muluzi would run for an unconstitutional third term in office. Members of opposition parties are often denied coverage in the state media, which is almost entirely controlled…
Although Mali’s press laws include punitive presumption-of-guilt standards, the media environment is reasonably liberal compared with many other African countries. Mali also has a strikingly diverse press corps, with about 40 private newspapers, some in French and others in vernacular languages, and about 100 radio stations, one fifth of them unlicensed.