Togo Media Sustainability Index (MSI)
March 15, 2012
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 Togo Chapter (PDF): 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2006/7 | 2006/7 (français)
MSI Togo-2010 Introduction
Overall Country Score: 1.62
In 2010, the Togolese press gained a little more freedom, although Togo’s overall MSI score of 1.62 increased just slightly over last year’s average of 1.54. It is the Togolese journalists who deserve the credit for this year’s progress, as they have defied fear and threats to provide the public with quality news and have been perhaps too outspoken, particularly with respect to politics, human rights, and the breaches of democracy and the rule of law. Togolese journalists tackled economic and development issues in investigative reports on government spending, particularly the spending of the president of the republic, and the cost of public works. While sometimes these articles may have lacked the consistency required by professional news providers, they must be praised for breaking taboos, raising public awareness, and causing public authorities to start exercising some restraint in making certain decisions.
Feeling threatened as a result, the government tried to toughen up the law of the Haute Autorité de l’Audiovisuel et de la Communication (HAAC) to allow this institution to muzzle the press. Journalists fought against this law that would have given HAAC the tools to ban shows, shut down radio stations and television channels, and withdraw the operating licenses of newspapers. The amendment of this law finally took place at the Assemblée Nationale in December 2009, but it ultimately happened with input from the media associations.
Over the course of 2010, a number of journalists faced brutality and harassment. In January 2010, a protest march was organized by the association Journalistes for Human Rights (JDHO) to denounce the attack of the security forces against the journalist Gilles Gbagba, who at the time was working for Radio Metropolys and who was brutally stopped by a police squad led by the general director of the National Police Force, Yark Damehane. Shortly after the results of the March 4 presidential elections were announced, many journalists became the targets of physical attacks, death threats, and all kinds of intimidation. Most of them were mistaken for demonstrators demanding to know the truth about the election results.
Many media outlets were also directly summoned to appear before the District Court and ended up being fined for higher damage amounts than the press code provides for, showing that the judges overstepped the law and used the criminal code instead. As a result, the tri-weekly newspaper, Golfe Info, was sentenced to pay XOF 83 million ($167,000), and a number of other papers were also subjected to high fines. Fortunately, some of these judgments were withdrawn at the last minute under public pressure.
Despite obvious intimidation, the Togolese press has ignored all threats and has become all the more determined to spread the news. Overall, the MSI results of the panel discussions of November 12, 2010, clearly show that in Togo, freedom of speech and the freedom of the press are alive and protected by legislation. The difficulty consists in getting the institutions of the republic to properly enforce the laws.
The Togo study was coordinated by, and conducted in partnership with, Media Foundation West Africa, Accra, Ghana.
