Abstract
When a government shuts down the country's only objective newspaper, there are highly original ways to speak out
On all major crossroads across the Zambian capital of Lusaka you find people selling the three main newspapers: the Zambia Daily Mail, the Times of Zambia and the Daily Nation. It does not really matter which one you buy, each is unashamedly pro-government and produces a daily litany of abusive headlines on the main opposition party, the United Party for National Development (UPND).
There is a larger, fourth newspaper, but its distribution is less reliable. The Post is owned and edited by a colourful individual named Fred M'membe. For many years it managed to remain largely independent of political parties, a thorn in the side of corrupt officials and underhand businessmen. Its tagline was “without fear or favour”. Previous governments and opposition parties regularly took a bashing from The Post, widely admired across Zambian society as representing the democratic values and accountability the country traded on.
But those values have eroded since Edgar Lungu became president in January 2015 in a disputed presidential by-election following the death of his predecessor, Michael Sata. With less than six weeks before a new election this August, the offices and printers of The Post newspaper shut down following a string of headlines criticising the brutality of Lungu's regime and alleging corruption in his government. M'membe, his deputy and his wife were arrested and beaten by armed police officers.
The official reason for the raid was unpaid tax bills. Nobody disputes that money is owed, but M'membe says his business is more up to date than most organisations in Zambia and that other newspapers have had their tax debts written off. It also became clear that unpaid bills that the government had incurred from advertising in The Post amounted to more than any sums it owed the Zambian revenue authority. Delegates from the International Press Institute and the African Media Initiative met in Lusaka and called on Zambian authorities to allow The Post to reopen. They suggested it had been silenced ahead of the election for political reasons, raising concerns over the state of democracy.
The crackdown on press freedom was not limited to print media. The national broadcaster, ZNBC, became little more than a private mouthpiece for the Patriotic Front government, and few popular radio stations dared to criticise the government for fear of closure.
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Restrictions on press freedom is nothing new in much of Africa, particularly around election time. The stakes for incumbents and their supporters are high, with millions of dollars resting on the awarding of tenders and other business opportunities. There is a view that the media, or anything else that could influence the outcome, should be supportive or disabled. According to Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based NGO focused on defending the freedom of press around the world, press freedom has declined in Uganda, the Republic of Congo and Djibouti in the past year – in each case in the build-up to elections.
As a paid adviser to the election campaign of the opposition leader, Hakainde Hichilema, I've had a particular interest in what was happening in Zambia. Trying to get a message to the electorate when there were so few channels was challenging; having the key, objective outlet shut down was frustrating. Newspapers, of course, are no longer the only thing and we were already working other channels. Fortunately, while print media and television have traction in the two largest urban areas of the country, Lusaka and the Copperbelt, their impact in areas beyond is limited. So we worked hard to get our messages out by other means, particularly local community radio stations and physical campaigning.
It does not take too many resources to launch a community station and plenty of international grants are available. There are around 1,000 operating across Zambia, each with a specific local audience. While their content may not be the most in-depth or sophisticated, for a rural nation that lives largely off-grid, these stations represent the only opportunity to get some sense of news.
Happily, the sheer number and the small size of these stations put them largely beyond the grasp of state infiltration. With a strong provincial structure and modest funding, they created a reliable and strong platform for fair broadcasting, becoming crucial for any opposition movement attempting to get their point of view across.
Political rallies offered a blunter campaigning tool. Over the past two months, both the government and the opposition held huge rallies across the country. Whether they reflected popular support was unclear, for it was common to see the same crowds turning up at a government rally one week and an opposition rally the next, but they did provide a platform for political leaders to talk to the people.
Here too were signs of government intervention. There were many instances of opposition applications for rally permits being rejected at the last minute. In one case in July, a permit for an opposition rally in Lusaka was overturned once supporters were arriving, with police shooting and killing two members of the crowd in the unrest that followed.
Given this restrictive environment, and building on the electorate's desire for activity, we made a documentary and a series of short advertisements based on the leader of the opposition's life, what he stood for and what he would do to turn around the country's fledgling economy. Of course, ZNBC refused to show the documentary or the adverts on the grounds that they were critical of the government.
At that point we took the documentary directly to the people. After hiring a fleet of pick-up trucks and a branded double-decker bus for the more urban areas, the team criss-crossed the country, visiting some of the most rural and deprived areas and holding screenings. Sometimes a local school hall or a community centre was prepared in advance by local party members; at other times we would just turn up in a village, play some music from the trucks’ loudspeakers to bring people running and project the film onto a bedsheet tied between two trees.
This was a long way from the organised press conferences we see in the UK, but the impact was unprecedented. For many, it was the first time they had seen any sort of film, and it went some way in changing perceptions and raising awareness of the candidate, as well as mobilising disenfranchised voters to vote.
It is also why campaign music is popular in many African election campaigns. In Zambia, the government and the opposition each commissioned more than 10 campaign songs for different parts of the country. A good jingle or chorus of a local Zambian beat can have a major impact, particularly on public mini-buses and in local markets. In the more urban areas, where the internet has taken off, we ran targeted social media operations. With illiteracy rates still high, the impact of visual tools was key. We used clever but simple policy graphics and live-streamed events on Facebook.
While some governments have been working to censor social media – most notably in Turkey recently – we have seen no such restrictions in Zambia. For that reason, several more balanced and reliable news websites have been launched by independent organisations. We saw some coordinated digital attacks, designed to bring down individual blogs and website, but with increasingly sophisticated server protection, often based outside the country, it is not easy to close these down.
Government horror at cartoon
The impact that digital media can have on an African election was first highlighted in the Zimbabwe elections of 2013. For some years, Zimbabwe has not even pretended to have a balanced media. You can imagine the horror in government circles when a self-proclaimed, disaffected insider of the ruling Zanu-PF party launched a Facebook page called Baba Jukwa, bearing a disarming profile picture of a cartoon old man.
David Smith, the then Guardian Africa correspondent, was first to report: “Mr Jukwa traffics in political napalm, spilling damaging details of high-level party meetings, allegations of voter fraud and embarrassing gossip – all replete with private phone numbers for citizens to harass the officials in question.”
Inevitably, the state-controlled Herald newspaper immediately denounced the mole's malicious motives and puerile endeavour. Indeed, President Mugabe himself offered a six-figure sum for his identity. The Baba Jukwa site demonstrated how free press could still exist, if not flourish, in a dictatorship. We were pleased to see, in these latest Zambian elections, shortly before The Post was closed, a new fictional character, Kashikulu (a local term for a wise old man), emerge. He spilled government secrets and lifted the lid on chronic corruption in public services.
All the good journalists I have worked with want to get to the truth. Once they are on the scent of a story, nothing spurs them on as much as efforts to lead them off the track. I'm pleased that among journalists and activists working in parts of Africa where there is no press freedom, restrictions seem only to drive them to find more creative ways of getting the truth out, even if it is from behind the curtain of an anonymous website or fictional social media character.
There is an important role too for respected international media outlets, which have more influence and power than perhaps they realise, particularly given the reach they have with international pressure groups. If they seem sometimes to err on the side of caution, that gives greater weight to what they report. We worked hard to provide international journalists with facts and access. We tried to respond to requests quickly and helpfully, and the facts often spoke for themselves.
In the end we lost, but we believe that Lungu's narrow victory was based on fraud. We've taken our evidence to the Zambian courts and to those media outlets that were prepared to listen.
So is it possible to get an opposition voice heard in a country where the media are not free? Yes: the truth eventually will out, for the will for free speech is there. M'membe did not give up, despite seeing his offices barricaded after publishing the account of an undercover activist who had evidence that Malawian nationals were being provided with Zambian voting cards. Nor will others. Over the past six months, I have seen resilience among many other local journalists and their sources, who often put themselves in harm's way in the process.
But faced with a government prepared to stifle free speech, we must find other means of getting the message across. It is hard to circumvent a party that holds power over traditional media, but there are alternative ways to communicate to a target audience. We just need new strings and other bows. Will they be enough to bring electoral victory? If the vote is fairly conducted, yes.
