Jim Day
LESS than five years after the founding of an independent press in Mozambique, two of the nation’s top independent editors remain confident that the country’s press will remain vibrant.
In a society dominated by government newspapers including the daily Noticias and a Sunday paper called Domingo, both these editors have successfully found a niche market to cater for their Portuguese readers.
Carlos Cordosa, the editor and founder of Mozambique’s first privately owned publication, Mediafax (a faxed newsletter), says its a ”confusing time” for the press, but quickly adds that some of the confusion is ”absolutely marvelous” as the independent press is able to take full advantage of the state of play.
Unsure of the direction that the Mozambican press is going, Cordosa says the challenge facing a free Mozambican press is no longer its survival, but to avoid becoming ”the new dictators” of policy.
”We [the press] are now the third estate,” he says, after foreign aid donors who carry much power and the informal sector which is controlled by the government and a gangster element.
The press, says Cordosa, is the engine of Mozambican civil society.
Solomon Moianu, editor of the independent weekly Savana, talked about the freedom he and Cordosa enjoy when covering ”touchy” government scandals in Mozambique.
”The object of setting up this paper was to try to fill the gap, a big gap, in the press,” said Moianu. ”It was to help people see there could be a different way to tell a story.”
Speaking to the Mail & Guardian at their offices in Maputo last week, both Cordoso and Moinau say they have, in recent years, exposed several stories that would have been covered up and ignored without an independent press. These stories have ranged from government involvement in inter-tribal rivalries to transportation scandals that were costing the impoverished nation millions of rands.
But despite the successes of developing the independent press in Mozambique, Cordoso is now thinking of leaving Mediacoop, the holding company of Mediafax and Savana, with a view towards establishing a new publication.
Since 1975, when Mozambique gained its independence, until 1992, Mozambique was without an independent publication. In that year, Cordoso, Moianu and a small group of other journalists founded Mediacoop, which began publishing Mediafax and, shortly thereafter, the 15 000-circulation Savana.
An intense and free-thinking socialist, Cordoso keeps turning catchy phrases like ”this cacophonic economy we live in”, ”the politics of confusion”, and ”the new romanticism of economics”. His urge for a new publication is to ”declare independence from the state”.
More than 80% of the Mozambican economy is informal, and he wants to join that sector to avoid bureaucratic meddling, he says.
Journalism in Mozambique must carve its own path, different from the Western schools of journalism says Cordoso, adding that material should be published in a more free-wheeling manner if it wants to reflect the ”renaissance” he believes Mozambique is experiencing.
However, Moianu speaks of more conservative ideas of journalism and remains content with publishing a fairly traditional, less cheeky weekly newspaper than the publication envisaged by Cordoso.
But Moianu agrees that the Mozambican press finds itself in an environment in which it can grow and thrive: ”There is room in this country to be an independent newspaper. There is still room to explore.”