When mass communication practitioners in Tanzania rejected this month a draft Freedom of Information Bill meant for parliamentary endorsement, their consideration was whether the bill could ensure what its title had promised.

"The bill is taking even the little we have achieved," lamented Tanzania Media Owners Association Chairman Reginald Mengi who champions the concept that good governance, transparency and fight against graft would only be achieved if there was freedom of information.

The draft bill proposed to replace the non-statutory Media Council of Tanzania with a state regulatory board to be in charge of accreditation, arbitration of disputes and enforcement of code of ethics.

The rejection and then a call by the Tanzanian media practitioners to review the draft were concrete steps in media development in this part of Africa.

Elsewhere on the continent, journalists, editors and media owners also achieved their own progresses, big or small, in the past year. And they made headways in more realms than just freedom of information.

While Western pundits put press freedom under microscope to differentiate African countries, the Africans themselves focused on how to merge their differences into shared opportunities that are expected to help put coverage of Africa and interpretation of such taken-for-granted African synonyms as debt and disease, corruption and conflict as well as poverty and famine in their proper perspectives.

"Until we learn to interpret these issues, the Western media would continue to give the wrong image of Africa," said Godwin Agbroko, editorial board chairman of the This Day newspaper.

The Nigerian newsman added that the Western media are not interested in the historical aspects that have shaped the realities in Africa and that they are only keen to view the continent with their own vision.

To help redress the grievances, the African continent has resorted to three waves of Pan-African trail-blazing moves: first the Union of National Radio and Television Organizations of Africa (URTNA) starting in 1962; then the Pan-African News Agency (PANA) beginning in 1979, and now the envisaged A24 TV Channel to incept broadcasting soon.

The first two were orchestrated by a plethora of states affiliated with the then Organization of African Unity (now the African Union) and the third was pronounced by an individual mastermind, all cherishing the same hope of fending off Western media domination if not distortion of Africa.

The 50-million-U.S.-dollar plan by Salim Amin to launch a 24- hour Pan-African TV news channel is said to be nearing completion.

But why should there be one more outlet in the already seemingly crowded media operation in Africa?

From Cape Town to Cairo and from Dakar to Dar es Salaam, each and every African country boasts of scores of mass communication institutions in the form of either television, radio, print, photo or Internet, be it state, public, private or community media.

The media pluralism is there, for sure, to accompany if not to secure the process of democratization.

"It will be very much along the lines of what Al-Jazeera is doing for the Arab World by telling their story the way they know it," said Amin who expects the channel to present Africa as a place of both good and bad, of both honesty and corruption, of both economic vibrancy and poverty, and of both eager entrepreneurs and those who just rely on foreign aid.

While Amin is locating the kick-off fund, local and overseas pundits have had to ask themselves how the son of photojournalist Mohammed Amin is going to maintain impartiality as he has promised as he may not be able to repay the debt in a short period of time.

There are already too many media outlets, not only in Africa, which could not hold their own financially long enough to make a fame, not to mention a fortune.

Zimbabwean publisher Trevor Ncube knows the problem just too well. The chief executive of The Mail and Guardian said that lack of money had hampered the growth of the media industry in Africa.

Kenya's Nation Media Group CEO Wilfred Kiboro echoed that a weak media could not resist control by the executive or other economic forces. "Some media are weak for lack of finances and under such circumstances, whoever pays the piper calls the tune," he said.

So credibility is another norm to go by in the campaign of righting the wrong.

Though between 2002 and this year, Ghana's ratings on the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) annual press freedom index have climbed 33 places from 67 to 34 among 168 countries worldwide, many Ghanaians themselves have begun to feel uncomfortable with their free-for-all media, according to George Sarpong, who is the executive secretary of the Ghana National Media Commission.

"The performance of the local media is by and large dominated by extremely unprofessional and reckless reporting. So professionalism is a big problem here," said the journalism professor.

When journalists from Africa and Europe met in early August this year to discuss the vision, need and responsibility of media practitioners in Africa, Christian Zabel from the HMR International suggested that the African professionals should heed both the successes and the mistakes of their European counterparts so as to fare more uneventfully in their media development.

The European media practitioners have just undergone a period of intense consolidation, convergence, shifting advertising, labor and technology, indicated the Cologne-based media consultant.

It is simply unadvisable to veer off the blazed trail. The trail for Africa has been charted out by the United Nations as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in both society and economy.

Ambassador Mohamed Sahnoun, a special advisor to outgoing UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, proposed to African media practitioners that what they do can be an essential tool for both social and economic development.

"The media should be an ally to those who strive for good governance, democracy and constant battle against poverty, disease and ignorance," said the UN envoy who is also the vice-chairman of the council of the UN-affiliated University for Peace.

What he is hinting at is a balance between the traditional service media and the commercialized market media and between the press freedom of reporters, editors as individuals and the rights of information of the society as a whole.

Judging whether the media in Africa has made any progress in 2006 by just a single RSF index may be lopsided, because there are other yardsticks in ready stock.

The problem is which one to use as well to gauge the development.

Source: Xinhua