This month sees the launch of the revived news agency of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) — a move that hopes to put more information into global circulation, but which also highlights problems in African initiatives.
The NAM service comes into being seven months after a meeting of its member countries’ information ministers. According to its website, the new NAM News Network (NNN) ”sees itself as an alternative source of information rather than being in competition with other major news services”.
This approach differs from the 1980s ”New World Information and Communication Order” when Third World countries set up state news agencies to counter ”imbalanced” international news flows from the First World. Today, the NNN differs by aiming to boost business-related knowledge between NAM countries primarily.
Following this focus, the site proclaims that its content will not support its contributors’ proprietors (in its case, mainly governments), nor any ideology or hidden agenda. It further asserts that ”credibility of information is paramount” and that it will uphold ethics and accuracy.
But the contrast between these fine words and reality may ultimately sink the initiative. This is because most NNN contributors are government-controlled agencies whose main job is propaganda in various degrees. That’s not to say, though, there is no interest in the content they produce.
For example, on the NNN you’ll find copy from Chinese agency Xinhua — an outfit that’s thought to have more correspondents than anyone around Africa. They file stories on their premier’s visit to Africa, for example. You can also read about World Bank loans to Cairo from Mena, the Egyptian state agency. The Kenyan Broadcasting Corporation contributes content, as does Pretoria’s Bua News.
So, the stories on the NNN come with some baggage. Even so, they do have a place in the wider pluralism of international information flows.
And, despite its lack of independence, the NNN has at least achieved more than the Southern African Development Community (SADC). Back in 2004, Southern African countries agreed that the state-information agencies in the region should set up the SADC News Agencies Pool.
At the time, Mozambique was earmarked to be the node where information would be processed and exchanged. But nearly two years later, the project still waits on the SADC to find funding.
Meanwhile, Maputo’s own state-owned service, AIM, has established its own direct e-mail exchanges with viable counterparts in other countries in the region. That may be the way to go, because the health of most SADC government news agencies is pretty poor.
Tanzania’s operation has closed down, while Zimbabwe’s seems almost defunct. Zambia has 20 new correspondents recently deployed to report from rural areas, but is under-funded and blurred with PR.
To date, most of these state bodies have escaped the attention of media reform lobbies. Public pressure has been put on government broadcasters to change into public-service bodies; state-controlled newspapers — following the Nigerian example — have been proposed for privatisation in some countries.
But the reform focus fell on the news agencies at a meeting last weekend convened by the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung near Pretoria. The Friedrich Ebert Stiftung is a private, non-profit organisation committed to the principles and values of social democracy.
Participants agreed on the need to distinguish two kinds of agencies. On the one hand, there are explicit governmental information providers like Bua News; on the other, ”real” news agencies that are supposed to report on society more broadly and independently.
The meeting recommended that the many unhappy hybrids in Southern Africa should do one job or the other. For those honestly doing government PR and info (as distinct from ruling-party PR), however, there is still an issue about their relative costs.
In South Africa, funds are poured into Bua News, and also into Vuk’uzenzele — a government magazine with more than a million copies printed in various languages. This total cash injection likely exceeds the value of the grant given by the government to the Media Development and Diversity Agency. In other words, Pretoria spends more on getting its message out than on empowering its citizens as communicators.
This is not to deny that government information is important. The bulk of other media in the South African landscape carries other kinds of stories, so Bua does have a role to play in the broader pluralism we enjoy. It’s primarily its place in governmental spending that can be questioned.
Other Southern African countries operate in a different information environment. Most of them have governmental — rather than public — broadcasting and, very often, government-controlled newspapers as well. In all these cases, public funds that go into these ”agencies” add little diversity to the public sphere: instead, they mean yet another government mouthpiece (now masquerading as a news service).
There’s a need to reform all government-controlled media in these countries, and not least the neglected issue of the ”news agencies”. Where there’s a case for them to become real news agencies, they should be transformed into proper public-service bodies with independent boards. And they should be accountable to, and funded directly from, Parliament rather than government ministries of information.
Another option could be to turn them over to their clients — that is, to the media in the given country. Shareholders then could include both publicly owned and private media. Civil society groups might even be involved on advisory boards or as non-voting shareholders.
Public funds could still be contributed to these institutions where their services are unable to cover costs.
At present, the NNN includes some African voices. But that doesn’t help the SADC develop an effective flow of credible news within its member states themselves.
Reform of state news agencies could really do for the region what the NAM only hopes to do on a wider scale.