Letter from Africa: Journalists under threat Published duration 3 September 2015

image copyright AFP

In our series of letters from African journalists, film-maker and columnist Farai Sevenzo looks at the threats facing journalists in Africa.

On the corner of Vladimir Lenin and Augustine Neto Avenues in the Mozambican capital, Maputo, a man was recently taking his morning exercise before facing his day in this most charming of Lusophone outposts.

A car drove by reportedly packed with youths, one of them then fired four shots from an AK-47 assault rifle. Two bullets hit the exercising man in the back; two hit him in the head and ended his life.

When Mozambique's Frelimo liberators placed the AK-47 on the national flag as a symbol of their fight for freedom from Portuguese colonialists, they could scarcely have imagined its sinister significance in the murder of journalist Paulo Machava on the streets of Maputo 40 years after independence.

image copyright AFP image caption An attempt to get the gun dropped from Mozambique's flag failed in 2005

And before Mr Machava there was Carlos Cardoso, the well-known investigative journalist whose life too was taken by the AK- 47 at the beginning of this millennium - and whose assassination Mr Machava himself investigated.

'Unpatriotic tendencies'

Just a week before the murder of the Mozambican journalist, Peter Julius Moi was shot and killed in Juba, South Sudan. Unidentified gunmen shot the reporter for the Cooperate and New Nation independent bi-monthly newspaper twice in the back as he walked home from work on 20 August 2015.

A few days earlier, the president of Africa's youngest republic, President Salva Kiir, had been at the airport preparing to fly to Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa, for yet more peace talks in South Sudan's protracted wars. He told journalists gathered around him in Juba:

"If anybody among you journalists does not know that this country has killed people, we will demonstrate it one day, one time… Freedom of the press does not mean you work against the country."

After Mr Moi's death, the president's office claimed that his remarks had been taken out of context, and that "nothing shall harm a journalist when he/she is going about his/her journalistic profession".

Farai Sevenzo:

image copyright Farai Sevenzo

"For the African media terrain is as asinine as it is unforgiving - it is where authority confuses independent scrutiny with treachery, where beatings are administered for covering poaching or who owns which mine, and where gangsters can hire assassins and pay off the courts"

But this was not the first such incident - at the beginning of 2015, five South Sudanese journalists were mowed down when gunmen ambushed an official convoy in South Sudan's Western Bahr al-Ghazal state.

Since South Sudan became independent in 2011, media outlets have been habitually closed down and journalists arrested and held without charge.

Some 1,143 journalists have been killed around the world since 1992; the year the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) began compiling figures.

image copyright AP image caption Peter Julius Moi was killed on the outskirts of South Sudan's capital Juba

Of these, 234 were from Africa, while the numbers for the disappeared, the jailed and the beaten remain opaque despite the frequency of such occurrences.

No African journalist in Juba or Asmara or Kampala lives on the endless expense accounts afforded to some foreign correspondents, who have the luxury of chartering flights and 4x4s to trouble spots.

Locals string and fix for the khaki-clad foreign teams and remain under suspicion for "unpatriotic" tendencies, they are despised when in fact they are slaves to the truth. They sometimes die penniless from injuries sustained in the service of their profession and have no life insurance, nor are their possessions covered when agents of the state in, for example, The Gambia, set their houses on fire.

'Despicable silence'

In Egypt, for instance, they have the full force of strange new laws thrown at them and are accused of being part of a banned organisation because they have interviewed the opposition.

A retrial of jailed journalists threw out the charge that they belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood, but despite international outrage an Egyptian judge insisted last Saturday that they were unregistered and had been operating from a Cairo hotel without a licence.

image copyright AP image caption Al-Jazeera journalist Mohammed Fahmy was jailed for three years for 'spreading false news'

And so when they are shot dead or simply disappear from the streets of African capitals, governments wring their hands and look the other way, their assassins rarely brought to book and their families never compensated.

It is a waste of time to speculate on why Paulo Machava lost his life on the streets of Maputo during his dawn run, or on what it is Peter Julius Moi had said or written to warrant his death by two bullets in the back as he walked home to his family in Juba.

Or on why the Gambian radio journalist Alagie Abdoulie Ceesay was bundled into a car in Banjul a month ago and then slammed with sedition charges while the state claimed not to know where he is.

And let's not forget that it is now more than 10 years since Deyda Hydara, editor of The Gambia's Point newspaper and a critic of laws restricting press freedom, was gunned down - yet a decade on, no-one has been charged over his murder.

For the African media terrain is as asinine as it is unforgiving - it is where authority confuses independent scrutiny with treachery, where beatings are administered for covering poaching or who owns which mine, and where gangsters can hire assassins and pay off the courts.

And part of the fault lies firmly with the African Union and its despicable silence in the face of this on-going carnage. The journalism profession is by no means stuffed with saints, but nor are its members irritating annoyances to be swatted at will by African states and criminals.