The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA), Prof. Kwame Karikari, has indicated that the media’s function to promote democracy had been destabilised by the political and economic environment.
“…the media’s function to promote democracy is fundamentally subverted by several factors that derive from this political economic environment of eroding democratic space and conditions,” he stated.
Prof. Karikari was addressing a gathering at the opening ceremony of the seventh edition of its flagship programme, West Africa Media Excellence Conference and Awards (WAMECA), under the theme “Media and Democracy in Africa”, in Accra last week.
This precarious condition for democracy, according to Prof. Karikari, had made the media and media freedom a veritable casualty.
“The opening up of the democratic space enabled the emergence of independent media and relatively considerable freedom of operation of the media in most countries for much of the last three decades,” Prof. Karikari added.
He continued that these had not been sustained, largely because the states had mostly not gone beyond making constitutional provisions for press freedom. The states in Africa had been hesitant, at best, to initiating policies and institutions to strengthen the media as institutions for the advancement and promotion of democracy.
Moreover, to him, the generalised weak economic performance of most countries did not provide the industry resources, such as adequate advertising revenue, to sustain the media industry as strong institutions.
This, he said, some countries, such as Ghana, Mali, or others, the numbers of media establishments, especially radio and television, appear to be too big for the local economies to sustain.
“Low revenues to media translate into low, or sometimes no decent, incomes for media workers. The impact on professional standards and independent practice is not hard to imagine,” he said.
In many countries, he noted that politicians and their cronies in political parties were rapidly and increasingly dominating ownership of the media, and it was already impacting negatively on professional standards and independent and critical editorial decision making.
The use of social media, he emphasised, as channels for accessing news and information had grown exponentially across the continent over the years, but its freedom was frequently threatened with bans and closures by governments, especially during election periods and times of social unrests or popular protests.
Mr. Karikari further bemoaned that it was a disturbing fact that the media’s function in exacting accountability and transparency in governance and in public life had become the main target of attacks on press freedom.
The Executive Director of MFWA, Sulemana Braimah, who also addressed the gathering, stated that there was no better alternative than democracy. He asserted that democracy was talking about the progress across societies.
Mr. Braimah continued that democracy was about equality, inclusion, rights, women and gender empowerment.
This, he said, was why “we are concerned about the democracy. Because what it means is that when we talk about democratic recession, we are mostly talking about the recession in our development, financial life, and all the great things happening in the society.”
