DOUALA, CAMEROON – Amy Banda, a young journalist with Spectrum Television, a private television station in Douala, Cameroon’s largest city, is advocating for freer access to information after a recent reporting incident.
Banda says she and a station cameraman were out in the field investigating a protest by workers of a manufacturing company that makes employee uniforms. They were striking for better working conditions.
Banda says that she and her colleague asked to see the director of the company to verify the workers’ claims, but the security guard told them he was not on the premises. Unable to get the full story, they started to leave when the striking workers rushed to them and pleaded that they tell their story so that labor authorities would come to their aid.
“My cameraman was just obliged to get those images,” she says. “And before we knew it, this so-called manager who was not on seat came from nowhere all of a sudden.”
As the cameraman began to film the striking workers, the director suddenly appeared and politely asked them to follow him to his office so they could discuss the issue.
“But every moment we passed cross a door, it was locked under key behind us,” she says. “And we had three of such doors behind us.”
Banda says she and the cameraman began to worry.
When they finally entered the director’s office, he told them they had no authorization to be there.
“He used force on the cameraman,” Banda says.
But he refused to let go of his camera or his tape. The director detained them in his office for two hours, Banda says. Meanwhile, she tried to send text messages to a police commissioner and her director of information at the station for help.
Thirty minutes later, law enforcement officials stormed the company. Banda says there was a negotiation, and the incident dissolved.
“It just died a natural death,” she says. “It’s not supposed to be that way, but I’m in a country where I find myself in, and it ended up that way. I don’t have the money. I don’t have the guts.”
Banda was able to run the story on TV and show the footage of the protesters testifying. But she still says she laments being the victim of restricted press freedom.
“After that, I was so angry,” she says. “Because I couldn’t imagine that you’re not capable of doing your job when you have the right to do it. You’re being insulted because you’re fighting for some people who have the right to exist but who are being insulted too.”
Banda wonders aloud whether the incident provoked her revolutionary instinct or made her shyer.
“But is that going to make me stop doing what I like doing best?” she asks. “Is that going to make me stop practicing my profession? That’s a question I don’t think I can answer because I’m still in the profession.”
She smiles broadly, adding that she did learn from the incident the important lesson of always verifying her stories.
“Whenever I have a story and I have the chances to verify and have it balanced, I will always do it,” she says.
She encourages her fellow citizens to not underestimate the need for free, fair and balanced information.
“We know that information is power,” she says. “We also know that if there is no information, the Earth may come to a standstill. We need information to evolve.”
Most journalists in Cameroon agree that press freedom has increased considerably since the liberalization of the media two decades ago. But some say the denial of access to information is still an experience that almost every journalist in the country continues to face at some point. Others call for heightened responsibility from their fellow journalists before they ask for more access to information. They also press the government for strong regulatory structures to monitor the industry as well as to protect journalists.
Cameroon’s freedom of social communication law liberalized the nation’s press in 1990, though some private newspapers operated illegally before that. But the government didn’t authorize the creation of private audio-visual organizations until 2000. Until then, the state-owned Cameroon Radio Television dominated the broadcasting sector.
Many journalists agree that press freedom has grown immensely in Cameroon since the liberalization of the media. They say the public now has access to various news outlets, and journalists can report without fear of retribution.
“I can say the press in Cameroon is considerably free,” says Solomon Amabo, deputy editor-in-chief of Equinox, a private radio and TV organization.
He acknowledges fewer restrictions from authorities.
“If we compare the yesteryears where, for example, newspaper organs were forced to submit copies of their papers even before going to the printing press,” he says, “[in] Cameroon of today, we can say the press is free.”
Still, journalists say there are limits to their press freedom and access to information.
Amabo says that the editorial policies of some media, especially broadcast, organizations bar journalists from reporting on subjects such as homosexuality and religion.
“At the level of the radio and TV stations, there is some degree of freedom – [except the] editorial policies of the house preven[t] you from talking about certain issues,” he says. “So the freedom here is tailored according to the editorial policy.”
Swaibou Shareh, a journalist who works for the state media, Cameroon Radio Television, says that the government influences public media – but understandably so.
“As the name implies, it is a public media, meaning that it belongs to the state,” he says.
He says that public media should promote the policies of the state in order to help it to carry out its duty of serving the public interest. He says that sometimes this means journalists must censor themselves.
“If I have some information to give,” Shareh says, “no matter how authentic it is, if I judge and see that this information will cause war, more harm than good, by my own judgment or social responsibility, I’d prefer not to give it.”
Banda says that she receives less access to information from sources than her colleagues in state media because she is of the private media.
Shareh says that when journalists of the private media cite limited access to information, it might mean that government authorities do not have enough confidence or trust in them because of incidents in which journalists of the private media have mismanaged or sensationalized information.
“Sometimes when they are given a piece of information, they would go and twist it and come out with a different interpretation that was not the intention of the person who gave the information,” Shareh says.
Charles Ako, a former journalist who currently works as an institutional communicator with a state-owned structure, the Cameroon Chamber of Commerce, Industry, Mines and Crafts, says that the kind of communication he does now is administrative.
“I am not as free to communicate as I would be if I were working for a private media organ or even for the state [media],” he says. “We need to keep those administrative secrets. It’s just but normal that not every piece of information in the house is let out to the public.”
He says that this is to protect the structure's reputation.
Amabo says that this fear of disclosing harmful information is understandable, but journalists should have access to it and hold the decision-making power of whether to publish it. Throughout, they should mind their responsibility to run valid information that will not destabilize the state.
“As a reporter with a penchant for security and defense issues, there is lots of information which we shelve for the sake of national security,” Amabo says.
Shareh says that if information is kept from him, he will write his story and say that all attempts to reach a source were futile. That way, the audience can judge the situation for itself.
Amabo says that he pursues stories with a similar tenacity.
“I can go to any length to get a story,” Amabo says. “First, for personal knowledge before I think of the risk of publishing it.”
Another threat to press freedom is the risks to cover certain stories, as journalists lament that there is no protective arm strong enough to defend them.
With regards to protection, Amabo says that the only protection that the Cameroonian journalist has is: “the credibility of his information, honesty in his job and the fear of the Lord.”
Journalists can also protect themselves by avoiding getting involved in slander for money or blackmail, he says.
These activities make some journalists wistful for the days before the media was liberalized. They say that the resulting decline in standards among journalists should make them question whether they deserve more access to information.
“In my opinion, that freedom is often abused,” Amabo says. “People investigate and write stories and then publish without being worried by those concerned.”
Tricia Oben, president of the Cameroon Association of English-Speaking Journalists, addressed this point with fellow media colleagues during a congress for World Press Freedom Day earlier this year in Bamenda, the capital of Cameroon’s Northwest region.
“We are clamoring for access to more information, but is this because we want to edify the nation and be real watchdogs of the society?” she asks. “Or is it to blackmail and siphon money from culprits?”
Shareh calls these behaviors a cankerworm that affects the professionalism of some journalists and the fairness and balance of their coverage.
Oben, a veteran journalist also with the state media, Cameroon Radio Television, in Littoral, says the media exists to serve two complementary purposes: to break down complex societal issues for audiences and to provide a living for its owners and employees. She deduces that if the success of the media is judged on this premise, then the media in Cameroon has failed. Oben says that the media is becoming extinct: “a toothless media, one that hardly ever barks.”
“The media has lost its power, and its voice has been reduced to a whisper,” she says. “When we hear the voice loudly enough, it is either singing the praises of some patron or witch-hunting the patron’s adversary.”
She says that before the liberalization of the media in Cameroon, journalists were firm in the face of adversity because they were committed to the public’s right to the truth, not to bringing people down for their own benefit.
“We owed it to the public and not to the paymaster,” she says.
Oben told fellow journalists during her address that they were not fulfilling their duty to function as society’s watchdog with the rising prioritization of money over news values as the determining factor of what gets published. She said that journalists needed to return to their roots, when they “were the harbingers of change because they recognized the weight of their responsibilities.”
The National Communication Council was created to serve as a regulatory body for media practitioners. Ako says that the council is supposed to take action in cases such as defamation and has the right to sanction journalists. But he says that, first, the council needs an internal regulation to serve as a standard for the communication family.
Another step that journalists say can improve the standards of the profession in Cameroon is the National Collective Convention for Journalists, advocated for by the government and media syndicates. But Ako says that it’s weakened by the government’s lack of requirement for media owners to sign the convention.
“These owners do not appreciate it," he says, "especially when it comes to the dispensing of the finances they have because they judge that the money proposed for the journalists is so much."
He says it’s up to the government to change this.
“Government should make it law,” he says, “even make it voted in the National Assembly so that it becomes binding to the parties concerned, with cursive measures to make them implement it.”
Members of the Cameroon Association of English-Speaking Journalists recommend that the government enact a freedom of information act and increase its current funding of the private media.
Many journalists in Cameroon say that the revitalization of regulatory structures and creation of new acts would add order to the profession. Still, they admit that a huge responsibility lies with themselves to revive ethical journalism practice in the country and give it the credibility they say it once had.
“When we take up the fight for quality journalism as we should,” Oben says, “we will see noticeable changes that will reinforce the belief that the future of this country depends on the quality of the journalists that we have.”
Oben advocates for a campaign called Journalism for Democracy, through which journalists will fight for proper work conditions and pay so that they can practice ethical journalism.
“The decline in standards is a threat to democracy,” she says.
