Category Archives: Opinion

Such Images Have Been Used To Illustrate A Dark Side Of Africa

While I was away last week BBC hosted the Africa Debate and the topic was Africa’s image in the world.

I was in the village and could only follow the debate on twitter but the little bits I got included a panel of experts blaming the Western Media for creating an image of Africa which they is deceptive and wrong.

They blamed the western media for not reporting positive stories from Africa some even suggested that the image of Africa wouldn’t change until Africa gets a big media organisation that will tell African stories from an African perspective.

I must say I was disappointed but not surprised by the discourse. Lately, it has become part of an African elite’s mindset to blame someone else for the continents failings. They blame colonialism, like Africa was the only continent that was colonized. They blame the World Bank and the IMF because they give us loans, which we put to waste and then fail to pay back.

We blame all our failings on some Western conspiracy like we are the most hated people on earth.

Now they are blaming their media organizations for refusing to report stories of African success. They blame them for highlighting only the bad and the gory about Africa and they argue that this is the reason Africa isn’t attracting the right investment and therefore the reason we are making a slow progress out of poverty.

The argument is that because Africa is depicted in the media as desperate and suffering, the continent attracts mainly sympathy and donations in form of aid and not investment and that this keeps the continent needy, poor and dependent.

Most of the arguments, like most complaints in life, sound valid and justified but I refuse to blame anyone but ourselves for the terrible image Africa has.

It’s unhelpful to blame the media for reporting only the bad news. The media by nature are cynical, they looks for the extraordinary, that which is out of the norm. Ordinarily, everyone should be happy, healthy and prosperous. That is not news. News is when people aren’t happy, when they aren’t prosperous and when they aren’t healthy. Sadness makes news.

Sadly, look around Africa, you will see more sad news that good news. Are you therefore surprised why the continent is fodder for news buffs?

In the month of April alone, there has been a military coup in Mali, an attempted coup in Burkina Faso, Sudan and South Sudan are almost coming to full-scale war while Uganda and other East African states are cheering on, the nodding disease outbreak in northern Uganda got forgotten but not resolved and many more people continue to be infected and killed. Uganda using a colonial law ‘banned’ Activists For Change, an organization that challenges the government through civil disobedience. Walk to work protests turned into ‘breastgate’ with the groping of the breast of opposition activist Ingrid Turinawe.

Charles Taylor the ripper of Liberia and Sierra Leone was found guilty by the ICC at the Hague, Al Shabab continued to kill more people in Somalia and in South Africa the racist ANC youth leader Julius Malema got kicked out of the party and his appeal rejected. I can go on and on.

What were the positive stories that came out of African last month? Almost nothing but that isn’t unusual. Look at the coverage of Europe for instance. Since last year, the media has reported about the economic crisis in Greece, Italy and Spain and the recession in England and the general economic quagmire. What positives have the media reported? Maybe sex pests in France’s Dominic Strauss Khan and in Italy’s Silvio Barlusconi or Phone Hacking in UK newspapers?

Lets look at the Arab World, for years now the media is full of stories of the aftermath of the revolutions in Libya and Egypt. The breakdown of law and order in Libya and the constant anarchy in Egypt, and the unending slaughter in Syria, the unfinished revolution and the brutal police crackdown in Bahrain.

One but the basic is simple. The media will always report the story, which they believe is extra ordinary and which will interest their audience. Most times the extra ordinary is not very positive. If you have done something good and you want the media to write about it, you buy space on their networks and they do adverts for you. We’ve seen countries like Azerbaijan, Cyprus, Malaysia, Georgia, Croatia, Singapore, placing adverts on international TV networks and they have reaped big.

The problem is African countries don’t want to pay; they are used to free things like aid from donors. If we expect CNN or SkyNews to dispatch a TV crew to Uganda looking for a positive story, we shall be waiting for Godot.

The way forward is not to mob talk shows and rant about how Africa is hated by everyone in the world and how the rest of the world want us to remain poor. The solution isn’t to keep complaining about a ‘biased’ western media. Some have gone further by encouraging governments to find a way of censuring problematic media organizations and President Yoweri Museveni on many occasions has picked on media organizations and branded them ‘enemies of development’.

The solution isn’t to blame colonialists of countries with colonial mentality and the World Bank and the IMF for their ‘flawed policies’.

The solution, in my eyes, is to do the right things. But what is the right thing? Lets work to eliminate the bad stories, the bad news and the depressing statistics.

Lets get kids to school, get health services closer to the people, improve infrastructure, get people working, create jobs, get the banks lending, stimulate the economy, get the economy booming, punish the corrupt, replace the incompetent, respect human rights and promote good governance. African countries cannot keep doing the wrong things and expect the world media to turn a blind eye and report the scattered success stories.

But there is another way to change the world’s perception of Africa. But it involves doing extra ordinary things that are impossible for the world to ignore. Such will not solve all the problems but it will get the world talking about something totally different. Like if a country hosts successful events that capture people’s imagination like say a sports tournament like the World Cup or the Africa Cup of Nations.

South Africa had a terrible image before they hosted the World Cup in 2010. They had hosted the Africa Cup of Nations 1996 and the Rugby World Cup in 1995 and several sports events before but the FIFA World Cup is without a doubt the biggest sporting event in the world and no one gave them a chance of succeeding.

In the run up to the tournament, with rumors that FIFA would move the tournament to another country, the news was filled with statistics on how the country has the worst crime rates in the entire world and how criminals man every street corner, smoking opium and raping women and murdering people with reckless abandon. Foreign embassies issued damning travel advisories to football fans intending to travel for the games.

South Africa didn’t respond by moaning the coverage their country was getting in the world media. They didn’t set up their own media channel to rival CNN Sky News and Al Jazeera. They responded by advertising their country widely but most importantly by doing the right things. They increased police training and deployment on the streets, cleaned and lit up the streets, sealed the roads, built railways, built stadia, expanded the airports, equipped hospitals, and recruited thousands of volunteers. They organized a very successful World Cup tournament and silenced the cynics and made themselves proud. (Africa tagged along in sharing the pride)

Visitors who made the long journey south were impressed with what they saw, the top-notch organization and facilities. And the results of their investment are amazing, many of those visitors are returning to the country with their families and friends and the economy is reaping the benefits.

Suddenly, South Africa isn’t the crime capital of the world anymore; it’s the country everyone wants to visit. But make no mistake, the criminals haven’t gone on holiday, only that the perception of the country has changed from a land of criminals to a country everyone must visit before they die. Last year (2011) they had record number of visitors to the country. Almost 9 million visited the country and those visitors didn’t need Lonely Planet to tell them to get on the plane.

SA Tourism Minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk said that hosting the World Cup tournament gave South Africa ‘unprecedented international media exposure worth billions of dollars and left us with enhanced, modern world-class tourist infrastructure’

And as a result while tourist numbers in many other countries dropped owing to the economic troubles in the euro zone and the United States, South Africa had its best tourism season on record last year according to Business Report.

‘The total number of international tourists soared to 8, 339, 354 in 2011, which was 3.3 percent more than 2010 when growth of 15.1 percent was achieved in hosting the World Cup.’

One detail stands out:

‘While South Africa’s traditional core markets in Europe and North America remained the major source of long-haul tourists, the country’s overall growth in 2011 was largely due to a 14.6 percent rise in arrivals from new markets in Asia. This was mainly driven by Indian tourist arrivals rising 26.2 percent.

One wonders why Indians were flocking to South Africa yet football isn’t that much popular a sport in India. The answer is South Africa hasn’t been hosting only soccer tournaments.

In 2009, following concerns about players safety and with the Indian terror attacks of 2008 still fresh in mind, the India Premier League (IPL), a hugely popular professional cricket tournament was held not in India but in South Africa. And if you want to know the impact of the IPL: Over 200 million people in India alone watched the 2009 tournament on TV.

According to FIFA over 700million people global TV audience watched the Final Game of the 2010 World Cup between Spain and Netherlands on July 11 in 2010.

The salvation of Africa’s image will not come by flooding debating halls with elitist academics trying to impress. The solution might partly be found in the much ignored sports sector because sport dominates on the list of the most watched TV events in the world. But there is no real alternative to governments in Africa doing the right things first. Like planning and getting the plans in motion and being very ambitious.

England despite the economic recession and the street riots of last year retains its positive image worldwide partly because of the famous Premier league. On Monday night when the top two teams played each other in what was dubbed the Manchester Derby, an estimated 300+ million people around the world tuned in to watch the game on TV more than those who watch hourly news bulletins dominated by the phone-hacking scandal. This year they will be hosting the Olympic games and they play host to dozens other sporting events including Wimbledon.

And the exploits of Lionel Messi of Barcelona and Cristiano Ronaldo of Real Madrid ensure people around the world don’t have to look at Spain’s failing economy and its struggles with unemployment and separatist militants in the Basque region, the same with Italy and Portugal.

The same isn’t happening in Africa. Here the daily story is political conflicts and countries like South Sudan which has no toilet facilities planning to wage an expensive war against their neighbors and mothers dying during childbirth and policemen groping breasts of lady protesters and HIV funds getting stolen by public officials and regimes bribing Members of Parliament to stay in power and children dying of nodding disease and dusty roads with numerous potholes and constant electricity blackout and elitist academics blaming the western media for doing their job.