Gabon Media Sustainability Index (MSI)
April 24, 2013
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.
MSI Overview | Africa | Asia | Europe & Eurasia | Middle East & North Africa
Download Complete Gabon Chapter (PDF): 2012 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008
MSI Gabon - 2012 Introduction
Overall Country Score: 1.73
In this small country of 267,667 square kilometers and about 1,600,000 inhabitants, long regarded as an oasis of peace in Central Africa, the press is highly politicized. Political conflicts overflow into the realm of the media, confirming the African adage that “when elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.” In the context of Gabon, the elephants of the political microcosm—President Ali-Ben Bongo and his opponent, André Mba Obame—are behind all political events.
Thus, the political climate of Gabon, in its fifty-second year of independence, is characterized by political demonstrations, clashes, and riots that have resulted in many human victims. This is all because the elephants of Gabonese politics do not get along: Obame and the opposition want a national conference to settle the stalemate in the country, and President Bongo threatens: “I won’t let Gabon descend into chaos.”
Because of this, the state of the media has consistently suffered. In fact, on a day of national celebration, August 16, 2012, the transmitter for TV+, the television station of the main Gabonese oppositionist, Obame, was set on fire by armed men. Since then the station has been off the air. This incident occurred in the wake of violent confrontations during a demonstration by Obame’s banned party, the National Union, and coinciding with the return of Obame to Gabon after 14 months of exile in South Africa.
The media are under strict surveillance, to the point that, as one panelist stated, “Radio and television broadcasts have been banned, even on the airwaves of the public-service station, Gabon Television.” This means that the state media, usually a sounding board for the current government’s “heavy hitters,” are themselves suffering from unusual levels of monitoring of their broadcast content.
According to a panelist’s comments, “A beleaguered government is like a hungry pig: it even eats its own children.” Some participants also fearfully recalled that the National Communications Council, responding to the swell of criticism against all media outlets, “imposed some severe penalties on the media, such as with the Ezombolo and Une newspapers, which were just hit with six-month suspensions.”
The sustainability of the media as a professional, independent industry is highly questionable at best. The acts of repression and violence against the media, the panelists concluded, justify stating that “the freedom of the press is tightly controlled and even flouted in the Gabonese Republic.”
