“And that you may tell your children and grandchildren how severely I dealt with the Egyptians when I performed miraculous signs among them, so that all of you may know that I am the LORD.” – Exodus 10:2
On May 3, 2021, Malawian journalists joined media practitioners all over the world to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the International Press Freedom Day. Commemoration of May 3 as Press Freedom Day is traced back to the 1991 Windhoek Declaration that was the outcome document of the UNESCO-sponsored Conference on the Establishment of a Free and Pluralistic Press in Africa.” Even after 30 years, I still find the conference title to be long and a tongue-twister; however, 30 years ago, the conference sent the Malawi Police and special branch scurrying to the event finding themselves in the conference hall as delegates.
The Windhoek conference was one among five regional free press promoting events, but it was only the African regional conference in Windhoek that not only had an outcome document, in the form of the Windhoek Declaration that stipulated among others the celebration of Press Freedom, but the outcome had a global outreach in that the United Nations adopted the date and made it a global celebration.
Four people from Malawi attended the Windhoek conference; these were Al Osman (who was editor of the Botswana Observer), the two intelligence officials (from Malawi Police and State House intelligence official), and me. As editor of Woman Now, I was invited to Windhoek, as a representative of the free press in Malawi.
As Dr. Levi Zeleza Manda pointed out at the Namisa Gala event on Monday, May 3, 2021, information is like an instrument for public good whereby the Windhoek Declaration has helped in defining “and guided our media development in Malawi.”
Manda furthermore said that information, channeled through media reports, “drives and oxygenates business, agriculture, health, development, social, natural cohesion, international relations, and democracy.”
The media platform has evolved and become of age with four major television stations, two major daily newspapers, and a host of online publications and radio stations. The platform also boasts of media houses that issue three or four varieties of their information dissemination. Such is the plurality that the Windhoek Declaration framers envisioned for Africa.
For Malawi, it is a most welcomed evolution, because in 1991, under the autocratic one-party rule of Dr. Banda, the pressure was heavy on the media suppression, imprisonments were rife, and free and independent thought was not encouraged. To this extent, most out of country meetings and media conferences were attended by government journalists from the Malawi News Agency of Malawi Broadcasting Corporation (MBC) radio.
The organizers of the Windhoek Conference, however, would not have any of this government operatives as part of the planned UNESCO event. Thus the Southern Africa regional director Sam Moyo hopped from country-to-country interviewing delegates to be invited to the conference. While Moyo looked and found a delegate from Malawi, publisher and managing editor of Woman Now, the police and its special branch operative found their way into the conference hall.
The two security agents also made positioned themselves one on my right and the other on my left. Every time I raised my hand to speak, they physically and verbally told me to keep quiet.
Clearly, we were on opposite sides of our rationale for attending this important event. At break time on the first day, when I informed Al Osman how the other delegates are preventing me from making contributions; he told the two were police agents. Thus I changed seats and sat next to Al Osman for the rest of the conference.
Malawi’s attendance at the conference illuminated how our media colleagues from west Africa, east Africa, and North Africa regions were more advanced in their media activities; many boasted of having printing presses and radio stations. It was this discrepancy in the evolving free press, or the lack of it, that caused delegates from Southern African countries, to push for the establishment of an organization. This led to the establishment of the Media Institute of Southern Africa, a membership-driven NGO that advocates for media in the region. Botswana national Methaetsile Leepile became the first director. The organization has 11 country chapters, that includes Malawi.
As key sponsors through the 30 years since Windhoek, UNESCO has played its part and continued to sponsor various communications projects: the first set of computers for Woman Now were from UNESCO; six years after Windhoek, UNESCO funded the Malawi Media Women’s Association (MAMWA) Dzimwe Community Radio station in Cape McClear. This later project attracted a car for the association, motor cycles for journalist and tape recorders for the radio listeners’ clubs.
Crucial elements in any democracy are a media that is vibrant free, independent, and diverse. Government must jealously guard, protect, and play its earnest role of ensuring a viable, sustainable, flourishing, free, and independent media. This can be done by deliberate government interventions that promote the lifeline of the press through tax breaks, earmarked government spending in the national budget on the media.
If the above recommendations are absurd, out of the question, or mere whims of fancy, then consider a day without the media informing the public and the government.
Long live media independence of plurality in Malawi!