3 June 2007 HANA - Elvira van Noort, Cape Town, South Africa

“A great many journalists in Africa work with a gun to their head or a threat of a gun to their head,” alerts South African editor and publisher Raymond Louw during the Annual Press Freedom Round Table at the World Newspaper Congress in Cape Town.

Louw added that 48 out of 53 African countries have insult-laws but that the Declaration of Table Mountain, to be presented during the Congress, will aim at abolishing these laws in Africa.

Insult-laws - or anti-press laws - are used to threaten, intimidate, detain or even imprison journalists who are thought of as critical of government leaders. Louw used the past five months to research the harassment of journalists on the African continent and found 103 arrests in 26 countries.

Cameroon
Pius Njawe, publisher of Le Messager in Cameroon, has been jailed 126 times in his 27 years as a journalist but argues that “however hard the measures, we can and must always be journalists”. But as professor Fackson Banda, media analyst and columnist from Zambia, pointed out, the surrounding conditions are not in favour: “Africa’s media freedom is stuck between the hammer of the state and the anvil of the market”.

Banda illustrated this by not only arguing against insult-laws but also saying that the African market limits the success of media. “There is a concentration of media ownership and negligence towards content”, meaning that investigative journalism is not adequately financed but that the market does allow for the growth of tabloids.

Declaration of Table Mountain
The Declaration of Table Mountain, to be presented during the Congress, aims to foremost abolish insult-laws in Africa and to set free press higher on the agenda. The Declaration calls on African states to recognise the indivisibility of press freedom and their responsibility to African and international protocols that uphold the freedom, independence and safety of the press.

It also calls on the African Union to include in the criteria of ‘good governance’, in the African Peer Review Mechanism, the requirement that a country promotes free and independent media.

The Declaration will be presented to the UN General Assembly, UNESCO, and the African Union Commission to try put the document on the agenda of all African heads of state.

During the Round Table other speakers included Azubuike Ishiekwene, the executive director of Punch publications in Nigeria, who called for African newspaper houses to share resources, the introduction of self-regulatory media frameworks, implementation of freedom of information laws and a more creative use of information technology and cell phones.

Media Foundation
Kwame Karikari, the executive director of the Media Foundation for West Africa, stated that the media must “put the search light on exposing huge corporations that pollute rivers and destroy the earth”, because the media “only blow the whistle but at the same time keep numb”.

Karikari said that this encapsulates the move from critical to mainstream media that is occurring everywhere in Africa.

Other speakers during the Round Table included Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times; Edetaen Ojo, executive director of the Media Rights Agenda in Nigeria and; Jeanette Minnie, International Freedom of Expression and Media Consultant in South Africa.

For more information about the WAN Congress, the Press Freedom Round Table or The Declaration of Table Mountain please click here

You can view some of the photos I've made during the Congress if you click here