Ghana: Soft Control of the Press

A Dubious Normalcy

January is harmattan season in Accra, Ghana. Yellow dust billows off the Sahara, but this year from the east, the failed Kenyan elections blew their own hot storm. Ghana, fifty years independent and proud, confidently embraced democracy fifteen years ago. Now President John Kufuor, who chairs the African Union Assembly, was called to Nairobi to shore up democracy there. The Ghanaian media smile on every international display of the nation’s leadership capacity, as if the rise of Kofi Annan had sealed the matter for all time, but as Kufuor headed to Kenya, the local press debated a question that seems inevitable in this breathless age: “Could a Kenya happen here?”

It could not. Ghana’s fractures and potential fractures are not as deep as Kenya’s, and they are not primarily ethnic. Although elections in new democracies—Ghana’s will come in December—always risk cleaving the polity, a superheated Ghana would likelier melt than splinter. The hypothetical question of “Could a Kenya happen here?” is most interesting not for its incisiveness, but for the way it grips the media professionals responsible for shaping Ghanaian political discourse. The question captures the gravitational pull of the grand imaginary in the African press, the lure of the lurid, the condition of reporters in most of Africa today: eager to be professional, relevant, and hard-hitting; prepared to raise big questions abstractly, but cautious, even diffident on details. In reporting, the small questions give traction. But as state officials and others in Africa learn to use new soft methods of press control, the small questions are becoming the hard ones for journalists to ask.

Democratization swept Africa in the early 1990s, bringing to most of the continent’s fifty-three countries forward-looking constitutions, representative government, multiparty elections, and the legitimate rule of law. Part of the normal package of democratization and of the structural adjustment that coincided with it was media liberalization. Abolition of newspaper licensing laws opened the way for private, commercial, competitive print journalism. Deregulation and privatization of broadcast media did the same for radio and television. State-owned media outlets were cut loose. Newspapers, radio, and television in Africa boomed.

In Ghana, media liberalization commenced in 1992 as President Jerry Rawlings, former flight lieutenant and coup maker, converted democrat, came to understand the new neoliberal realities. By the mid-1990s, dozens of poorly printed but scrappy newspapers crowded each other at the kiosks. New radio stations up and down the dial filled the airwaves with a mix of highlife, rap, country, and lots of talk. Telenovelas imported from Mexico and Brazil and dubbed into Ghanaian English, as well as endless politically oriented public affairs shows, streamed into living rooms and storefronts where Ghanaians gathered for television.

Tensions so...