Kenyan Pundit

- Hot on the heels on the lack of decent hotels in Nairobi is this piece on Paris Hilton’s trip to Rwanda. Let’s all get together and say a prayer for her to survive Africa.

- PC Magazine’s Top 100 blogs of 2007.

- Bankelele has a great post up on Nairobi town clerk - John Gakuo - I’m sure many of us can attest to the fact that Nairobi has greatly improved during his tenure…and a key bell-weather (for some of us at least!) is the ability to hang out in town and have a drink after work with no worries…and I can’t remember the last time I saw Nairobi so well lit at night.

- Mzalendo is currently piloting an effort to build content on the site by working with constituency-based journalists and citizen reporters (who write for us for a fee), check out the initial profile of Gichugu constituency.

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State of Kenyan journalism in a nutshell (check the headline).

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Ethan’s recent post entitled “300 foreign correspondents overseas. And 3,000 in Washington DC?” made for interesting reading. The post was inspired by an Open Source show entitled “The End of the Foreign Correspondent?”

In my opinion, the problem of cutbacks in staffing foreign bureaus is compounded by the focus on the same old gloom and doom or trite stories when coverage is provided (any guesses as to how many foreign correspondents are covering the war in Iraq vs. the relatively calm post-election situation in DRC). One example, several months ago I was approached by a journalist from a very well-respected international paper. The journalist (a foreign correspondent in the East Africa bureau) wanted to do a piece on Mzalendo as an example of how Kenyans are trying to improve accountability within government etc. I spent almost two hours chatting with the guy. The story has never made it to the press. Last I heard, it was shelved because of the Madonna adoption brouhahaha. Maybe Mzalendo just wasn’t a compelling enough story. Or maybe, God forbid, it was actually a positive story about Africa that didn’t tie back to some massive donor/NGO intiative or that didn’t involve overcoming disease, war, insert tragedy here ____________.

Anyway, I was going somewhere with this post.

In, response to the cutbacks in foreign correspondents, Ethan likes Rebecca MacKinnon’s notion of “glocal” coverage i.e. global stories with a local connection. Ethan writes, “What could be a better resource for this than bilingual journalists living and working in DC with connections to their home communities? Who’s going to do a better job of reporting on Somalia in the USA than the Somali reporters covering their country in their native language for an audience in Somalia?”

I ask, how about staffing foreign bureaus with local journalists? It might not always be practical in all cases but it could be an interesting model. For instance, SABC Africa (their website sucks, but I find their coverage of African news especially in the a.m. and their specials on Africa, to be quite good) has hired Linus Kaikai (a Kenyan journalist) to head their office in Kenya and has adopted a similar model in other African countries where they have offices. Every couple of months someone from the head office in Joburg travels to the bureaus to make sure things are going well etc.

Now that’s glocal.

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First speaker = Peter Schellschmidt (Head of Friedrich Ebert Foundation’s Media Project for Southern Africa)
- Future of state owned newspapers and news agencies in Africa has largely been neglected.
- Big issue is funding vis-a-vis editorial independence.
The rest of his talk was very dry.

Second speaker = Tawana Kupe (Head of the School of Literature, Languages and Media Studies at the University of Witwatersrand).
- Historically, Africa has never enjoyed public media.
- Public media is needed to promote sustainable democratization and socio-economic development.
- Public media often only media that can serve ALL.
- Public media nees independent governing boards.
- Private financing is the wrong way to go e.g. public media that relies on advertising - content will not be diverse and there is no accountability back to the citizen.
-challenge is falling between the state and the market and varying degrees of govt control and the struggle to give a voice to all.
SABC is a good example of the way to go but not the best example, they still have things to fix. Interestingly enough, Botswana which is considered to be a great example of democracy in Africa has totally state-controlled public media.
- The content tends to be voices and megaphones of govts, quality and independence of news, failure to address citizens need.
- What is to be done? He went to quickly and I couldn’t type fast enough - basically funding should be primarily public funding, more accountability to citizens, independent governance etc.

Third speaker = Arlindo Lopes, Secretary General designate of SABA - Southern African Broadcasting Association
This guy was the worst kind of conference speaker, the kind you find at U.N., AU, and NEPAD type meetings. He basically read a dry speech. Nothing worth blogging about.

Q&A Session:
1. What models should be used in thinking about public broadcasting?
Tawana: We should not look elsewhere e.g. BBC - Africans should be innovative.

2. Who should lead the agenda of public media?
Tawana: We are in an age of political laziness - citizens want rights, but we don’t want to do our part to keep democratic space open. Citizens /Civil Society should do their part to keep the democratic space open and drive the agenda, don’t cede power back to the State to drive the agenda.

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The presentations that I have attended so far haven’t really been bloggable…here’s my first attempt to cover a workshop. The session is covering the status of the EASSY project. I expect the South Africa / Kenya tensions over the cable to come up in the discussion.

Dr Henry Chasia, the head of NEPAD’s E-Africa Commission was the main speaker. The highlights of his presentation focused on the background of the project:

- The cable is being developed in the context of NEPAD. 23 countries are involved.
- There are 3 components to the project: the development of the cable and the development of a broadband network first in East Africa then in West Africa.
- Network should be viewed as a public good and operate on a cost-recovery basis.
- Principles of the EASSY protocol:
1. Should be based on African ownership and leadership.
2. Should be based on African expertise.
3. Should reflect the partnership between African people.
4. Should reflect principles of regional cooperation.

- Benefits:
1. High capacity network to move traffic across the region.
2. Significant reduction in communication costs.

- Challenge: Achieving consensus on the policy framework.

Ben Akoh and Eric Osiakwan spoke on the challenges of regulation from the perspective of SAT3 users.
- Problem with the cable is that it was built by people interested in maintaining a monopoly structure. Primary beneficiary has been telcos.
- High costs of communciation: Ghana charges $3000 per MG/per second (on SaT3). Cameroon $15,000 per MG (on SaT3); South Africa $11,000 (on SAT 3).
- There’s very little media coverage on SaT3/EASSY and the infrastructure challenges around communication in Africa.
Eassy charges expected to be btwn $1000-$1500.
- Without infrastructure improvement - any talk about E-governement, e-service, e-commerce, outsourcing etc. can’t go far.
- Routing local web traffic internationally is consting the continent about $400 million a year. Costs for routing mobile calls between african countries is even higher. For more stats on connectivity within Africa, click here.
- Reducing Sat3 costs: Mauritus Case Study - declare that the cable is an “essential facility.” (Telkom SA is fighting that).
- How should EASSY be different: Separate ownership issues vs. access issues. Anyone should be able to invest in EASSY not just govt.
- KDN’s plans to build a competing cable is great - more competition, better prices.
- For more background on the status of fibre projects in Africa, click here.

From the Q&A Session:

- Are Kenya’s concerns about EASSY legitimate?
Dr. Chassia: Kenya has been part of the process, through out they should have raised their issues during the process e.g. with regards to the protocol they should have submitted their comments on the draft (4 countries did that) so far they’ve sent in nothing.

- A comment - enough is not being done to translate the implication of EASSY to the average person.

My take: So far, I’m pessimitic about the odds of a succesful outcome via the NEPAD process. Too many conflicting interests (and room for lots of conferences to resolve them). I hope I’m wrong. In the meantime, I think Kenya should go it alone and resell to interested parties at a competitive price.

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