Press Freedom Disappearing in Africa

By: This editorial appeared in the Dec. 15 issue of E&P.

With little notice and even less comment from the developed world, freedom of the press is disappearing in much of sub-Saharan Africa. Eritrea, for instance, now has not a single independent news organization operating inside its borders. Its government is also holding 15 journalists in secret detention, according to Amnesty International. That's a common practice in a continent where, the Committee to Protect Journalists says, about 180 journalists spent at least some time in jail last year.

Popular independent newspapers are a special target of some sub-Saharan governments, who use the genteel code words of "developmental journalism" to justify their repression. In the last couple of weeks alone, Zanzibar shut down its biggest independent weekly Dira "for the public good and peace" because it dared to discuss the island's union with Tanzania, and Sudan closed the English-language daily Khartoum Monitor because the paper "did not serve the interests of the country" with its investigations into modern-day slavery.

Criminal libel laws and licensing requirements are also convenient ways to muzzle the press in Africa. Since publishing an article in October suggesting Sierra Leone President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah was unfit to hold office, the newspaper Di People has been hit by a variety of "seditious" and "criminal" libel charges. On Nov. 4, the World Association of Newspapers reported, heavily armed police seized all the newspaper's equipment -- right down to Editor Paul Kamara's car.

Zimbabwe is the only sub-Saharan nation that is getting significant attention in the West for its oppression of press liberty -- but, then, President Robert Mugabe's megalomaniacal campaign against free expression of any kind is hard to ignore. Zimbabwean journalists routinely face arrests and physical intimidation. Mugabe's regime has kept The Daily News -- the last daily paper in Zimbabwe not published by the government -- closed for nearly three months by denying it a "license" to operate.

By strangling freedom of the press, despots like Mugabe not only violate the human rights of their citizens -- they also condemn their nations to continued penury. Material abundance is rarely achieved, and never sustained, where information and ideas are rationed. That helps explain why Zimbabwe has become an economic basket case right next door to prosperous South Africa, a land identical in almost everything but its embrace of press liberty.

The consequences of a silenced African press reach the shores of the United States, as well. In this era of globalization, Africa's profound problems are truly ours, and cannot be understood without unbiased and unbossed reporting from African journalists. We in America must take up their cause against anti-press tyrants who would remake Africa as a Dark Continent of secrecy, censorship and intimidation.