Cameroon Media Sustainability Index (MSI)
August 8, 2010
About the MSI
IREX designed the MSI to measure the strength and viability of any country's media sector. The MSI considers all the factors that contribute to a media system—the quality of journalism, effectiveness of management, the legal environment supporting freedom of the press, and more—to arrive at scores on a scale ranging between 0 and 4. These scores represent the strength of the media sector components and can be analyzed over time to chart progress (or regression) within a country. Additionally, countries or regions may be compared to one another. IREX currently conducts the MSI in 80 countries, and began studying Africa in 2006.
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Download Complete Cameroon Chapter (PDF): 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2006/7 | 2006/7 (français)
MSI Cameroon-2010 Introduction
Overall Country Score: 1.78
At age 77, Cameroon President Paul Biya has ruled for 28 years—the majority of the nation’s half-century of existence. Yet those years have not been enough for Biya to transform his country into what it was supposed to be: a bastion of development and democracy. In his speech marking the 50th anniversary of Cameroon, Biya himself summarized the state of affairs: “bad management, judicial insecurity, bureaucratic apathy, customs fraud and corruption are among the ills that must be systematically combated in Cameroon.”
Such great ills require great remedies, one might say. And yet, the government’s “Operation Sparrowhawk,” begun in 2004 to track down corruption and offenders against the commonwealth, is not yielding expected results. In fact, journalists are paying the high price for freedom of the press and for unveiling corruption, as evidenced by events in the beginning of 2010. The public prosecutor at the central Court of Appeal issued a statement then, warning journalists about the cases underway as part of Operation Sparrowhawk. Specifically, the prosecutor noted that the law forbids journalists to become involved in such cases, and pointed to confidential information from the operation’s ongoing trials that had found its way into the headlines of newspapers and radio programs without prosecutorial approval. The prosecutor warned the media about the risks—including prison—of publishing such information.
Days after the threat, Alex Gustave Azebaze Djouaka, Thierry Ngongang, and Rabbier Annanie Bindzi—all journalists working in the private press—were prosecuted by the Cameroonian justice system. They had anchored a televised debate on cases related to Operation Sparrowhawk and the Albatross affair (regarding President Biya’s aircraft, which was acquired under questionable circumstances). Moreover, the prosecutor claimed that the journalists were in possession of a document classified as a “professional secret”: the statement of a political figure that the Judicial Police questioned in Yaoundé.
According to the panelists, journalists feel that it is unacceptable in a democratic country such as Cameroon to be condemned for exercising the constitutional freedom to inform. The mission of true journalists, they argued, is to disclose information. One panelist noted that in other job sectors, “professional secrecy” means silence, while journalism requires practitioners to make facts and events public. Cameroon has no legal provision that orders journalists to maintain confidentiality of sources, and when someone who is obliged to maintain secrecy breaks that silence, it becomes news and journalists are beholden to report it. But Charles René Nwe, of La Nouvelle Expression, said that overzealous authorities prevent constitutional freedoms from being enforced properly.
During 2010, overall relations between the public (political and judicial) authorities and the independent press were quite tense in Cameroon. The government viewed private journalists as subversives, so arrests, imprisonments, beatings, and threats became the everyday lot of journalists in Cameroon.
The Cameroon study was coordinated by, and conducted in partnership with, Journaliste en Danger, Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo.
