When everyone else is running away from danger, war reporters hurl their cameras and microphones in the opposite direction to ‘get the story’. Paula Slier, the writer of this piece, is one of them. 



War reporting is more a calling than a profession. Why else
would an otherwise sane adult throw himself or herself in harm’s way? When
everyone else is running away from danger, these men and women are hurling
their cameras and microphones in the opposite direction to ‘get the story’.&nbsp; 



This year alone, 19 journalists have been killed in the
field. It begs the question if the job is worth the risk? Especially in the age
of Twitter, virtual reality and 360 cameras, can – and will – technology
replace human coverage on the battlefield? 



Wars today make no distinction between combatants and
journalists. Long gone are the days that the reporter was perceived as a
‘neutral observer’. Today, increasingly, the media is seen as a
legitimate-target in the so-called ‘information war’ that can be as important –
if not more – in the fight for public perception, than the battle itself. 



During the bloodiest days of the not-so-long-ago
Russia-Ukraine conflict, I reported from the frontlines alongside pro-Russia
fighters. 



I wore a bullet-proof jacket with the word ‘PRESS’ emblazoned
across it. Instead of offering me some degree of protection as one would
expect, the soldiers asked me to remove the jacket as they believed the
Ukrainian military would deliberately target me because I was a journalist. I
was thus making it unsafe for them too. 



Award-winning Italian war reporter, Fausto Biloslavo, has
covered most of the conflicts of the last 35 years. He believes this shift in
how journalists are viewed came about after ‘September 11’. 



“Insurgents no longer considered us witnesses to be
respected but cannon fodder for propaganda or ransom. Nowadays, in any war,
they always think that you are a spy and not a real journalist,” he says.



It doesn’t help that wars themselves have become more
difficult to cover. The rise of non-state actors like paramilitary and terror
groups means that, for years, swathes of Syria and Iraq were off-limits to
reporters. 



The only way a journalist could reach there was by being
‘embedded’ – attached – to an army unit. No wonder then that we are seen by some
groups as unobjective and pushing a particular view. It is very hard to travel
with the Kurdish army, like I did in northern Iraq, and be perceived by those
fighting the Kurds as neutral.



Amitabh Revi, associate editor of Strategic News
International, a niche Indian online news service, has had his fair share of
warzones. He believes that some wars are simply too dangerous to cover.



“It’s always a calculated risk. When I ask myself why I do
it, it’s to be the eyes and ears for those who can’t be there and frankly, just
to be there myself. Social media and citizen reporting are important, but for
sustained, comprehensive coverage, one still needs a professional.”



Small-sized digital equipment has seen the rise of the
so-called ‘accidental journalist’. These often young, unqualified reporters
venture into danger zones and take risks that their more seasoned colleagues
never would. The trend became so prevalent that major news organizations took
the unprecedented step of announcing they would not buy footage from
freelancers reporting in areas they deemed too dangerous to send their own
staff reporters to. 



Biloslavo has lost five close friends to conflict. 



The first was Almerigo Grilz, a kind of older brother to
him. He was killed on May 19, 1987, in Mozambique. filming a battle between
Renamo rebels and Frelimo government troops. Grilz made the mistake to move
slightly from behind the protection of a termite mound to film the rebel
retreat and was likely shot in the neck by a sniper.



“Almost always a journalist dies because he has made a mistake, small or big, conscious or not, as he travels along a dangerous road, photographing a tank around a corner or trusting the local population too much,” believes Biloslavo. And all the training in the world cannot prepare one for that moment. Often it’s instinct that kicks in at the last moment, especially when one must make that critical decision to move forward, stay put, or pull back.



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<div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter size-large is-resized"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Fausto-Biloslavo-672x1024.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-42522" width="464" height="706"/></figure></div>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">&#8220;No article is worth the price of life, but someone has to go and report about wars, the dark side of humanity. <cite>&#8211; Fausto Biloslavo </cite></blockquote>



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<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" width="1024" height="576" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Amitabh-Revi-1024x576.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-42521" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Amitabh-Revi-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Amitabh-Revi-300x169.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Amitabh-Revi-600x338.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Amitabh-Revi-768x432.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Amitabh-Revi-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Amitabh-Revi.jpg 1920w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></figure>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">&#8220;It&#8217;s to be the eyes and ears for those who can&#8217;t be there and frankly, just to be there myself. <cite>&#8211; Amitabh Revi </cite></blockquote>



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But despite all the risks, Biloslavo has no intention of laying down his microphone for good.



“I’ll only stop taking risks when I can no longer bear the
weight of the bullet-proof jacket, the helmet, the backpack and am unable to
run halfway through the whistle of the bullets,” he says. 



“No article is worth the price of life, but someone has to
go and report about wars, the dark side of humanity. This means accepting the
risks of being killed, injured or kidnapped.”



For Revi, he’ll only stop reporting when wars stop, which
implies never. 



“The most dangerous situation I was in was during a
so-called ‘double tap’ attack in Afghanistan,” he reflects. “The idea (of the
perpetrators) is to kill the first responders – medical, security forces and
journalists who rush to an attack. Instinct kept me away from the second of the
two blasts. So, in short, one needs loads of luck.” 



But what happens when that luck runs out? Sometimes, war
reporting can feel like a ticking bomb. I narrowly missed a suicide bombing at
the entrance to my hotel in Afghanistan. For three weeks, I had met the crew at
the same spot every day at 9AM. On the day of the explosion, we had an early
interview and left some 15 minutes before the bomb detonated – at the entrance,
exactly at 9AM.&nbsp;&nbsp; 



A mixture of faith and fate keeps me going. Faith in the importance of what I’m doing – writing the first draft of history – and fate that when my time comes, it’ll come, but not a second before.



As the US author, Horace Greeley, wrote: “Journalism may kill you, but it will keep you alive while you’re at it.”



&#8211; Paula Slier

Fausto Biloslavo

Braving Bullets And Death To Write The First Draft Of History

Facebook is hiring a small team of journalists to help curate breaking news and repair its strained relationship with news publishers, the social media giant announced Tuesday. 



The company says it will employ journalists to select breaking news and top stories that will appear in its soon-to-be-launched feature called News Tab, rather than using algorithms to determine what is shared with its vast network of users.



With the move, Facebook is part of a growing trend in the tech industry. Apple, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn and Snapchat have all employed journalists to help their companies sort through the news and cozy up to news organizations.



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Apple, for example, has used some form of human curation since its subscription Apple News app launched in 2015. In June 2017, the company hired former New York magazine executive editor Lauren Kern as the app’s editor-in-chief. Twitter has also employed some form of human news curation since 2015. 



Even with a team of in-house journalists, companies like Twitter continue to struggle in the fight against misinformation. On Monday, Twitter announcedit will no longer accept advertising from state-controlled media, in large part as a response to the discovery that China ran a misinformation campaign to combat Hong Kong protesters. 



Facebook, facing similar scrutiny for the same Chinese misinformation campaign, said that employing journalists will help “surface more high quality news.”



“Our goal with the News tab is to provide a personalized, highly relevant experience for people,” Campbell Brown, Facebook’s head of news partnerships said in a statement sent to Forbes. “The majority of stories people will see will appear in the tab via algorithmic selection. To start, for the Top News section of the tab we’re pulling together a small team of journalists to ensure we’re highlighting the right stories.”



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Facebook says the team will take into account user controls, pages and publisher as well as the news that users interact with or share,&nbsp;and other unnamed signals from its vast network to personalize content.&nbsp;



The company has been under pressure to mitigate its misinformation problem since it was revealed in 2016 that Russian operatives carried out a misinformation campaign in a “sweeping and systematic fashion” on the network, as it was described by special counsel Robert Mueller in his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.



The Mueller Report found that Russia spent $1.25 million per month on digital advertisements in an effort to sow discord in the U.S. and influence the presidential election. On Monday, Facebook came under fire for taking money from China to spread disinformation about Hong Kong protests.



The social media giant remains an important part of many Americans lives, much more than its rivals Twitter and Snapchat. According to Pew Research, about 69% of American adults use Facebook, and of those who use it, about 74% visit the site once a day. By comparison, only one in five U.S. adults (22%) use Twitter.



According to a survey conducted in 2018, about four in ten (43%) U.S. adults get at least some news from Facebook.



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In January 2017, Facebook hired Campbell Brown, a former television news anchor, to lead its news partnerships team. She remains a key figure in easing the tension between large national news outlets—those who have historically provided an endless trove of free content for the social media giant—and the company.



Publishing executives have slammed Facebook for siphoning advertising revenue away from traditional news publishers while also demanding that those same companies provide content for free. Following years of backlash, the social media company is now trying to work with publishers to create a more even relationship.



Facebook’s news partnership program involves deals that are potentially worth millions of dollars. The Wall Street Journal reports that several news outlets including the Washington Post, Bloomberg, Dow Jones, and the New York Times have discussed receiving as much as $3 million per year to license news content.



The News Tab, which has not been publicly viewed, is being positioned in stark contrast to the company’s Trending Topics news section, which shut down in 2016 following increasing pressure from users.



In 2016, the tech website Gizmodo published an article alleging contractors hired to curate the now-defunct Trending Topics feed were actively suppressing conservative news stories. In a letter to Congress, Facebook said, “We could not reconstruct reliable data logs from before December 2014, so were unable to examine each of the reviewer decisions from that period,” thus suggesting that it may have very well suppressed conservative news when the tool first launched.



-Michael Nuñez; Forbes

gettyimages-904274222-170667a

Facebook Joins Other Tech Giants In Employing Journalists To Curate News

You may not believe it, but this is my first article I have ever published, with my own fair hands, on a website &#8211; not just any website, but ForbesAfrica.com, the publication I have ate and slept for more than six years.
I feel exhilarated, excited and on top of the world. What a way to take our precious content on the important business and entrepreneur story to every corner of the continent? The possibilities stretch out in my mind like an endless blue horizon. How many more lives will we be able to touch, for the good, with our incisive and measured journalism? How many more entrepreneurs could these words inspire to take the plunge? I feel as giddy as I did on my first day in the job 36 years ago.
It also makes me think about how communications for journalists have changed so rapidly in the two decades I have spent reporting from Africa. I arrived to the chatter of the telex machine – for those if you under 50, that was a huge metal box that would type out incoming news onto paper that we had to rip off and read. On top of this, very few people had expensive satellite television; all we had was the faint crackle of shortwave radio. When we journeyed to the bush, on stories, even day-old newspapers were scarce – it was so bad, we used to miss the deaths and funerals of prominent figures, only to find out months later that they had passed on.
In those dim days, even using a fax to file stories was seen as man landing on the moon.
But now the technology is on the march and so is our journalism. I work hard every day of my career to carry it forward through the pens and ambition of our crack young team of African journalists at FORBES AFRICA. What an enticing and appetizing prospect.
In the days of telex, crackly radios and dodgy fax machines, we still managed to send out many great stories that went down in African history. Just think how faster and further FORBES AFRICA can send those stories now.

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There’s A First Time For Everything And It Blows My Mind

Africa’s brave investigative journalist, Bob Rugurika, has no place to call home and is living in fear of arrest and his life. Rugurika’s crime was to do his job by exposing human rights violence in his country. He’s one of over 100 Burundian journalists living in exile.
“As an investigative journalist, when I decide to go on, I become very attached to a story. I am very attached to my cause, to my mission, and that is informed by our radio editorial philosophy, it is to promote accountability to the members of government. We want to create a country without violence. If we are in a country with violence encouraged by authorities, then we can’t say we are in a country, we are in a (war) jungle. If we give up, this world will deteriorate,” says Rugurika, the Managing Director of African Public Radio; banned, but operating on the web.
The steadfast radio journalist, who was this year’s winner of the Press Freedom Award at the CNN Multichoice African Journalist Awards, presented this year’s Carlos Cardoso memorial lecture at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits). Cardoso was the slain Mozambican journalist who cut his teeth in social activism at the college in South Africa. Cardoso was a Wits student when the apartheid government deported him. Like Rugurika, Cardoso was also a thorn in the side of his corrupt government and was assassinated in 2000 when he was investigating a bank linked to the son of the president.
<div id="attachment_5511" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-5511" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="size-medium wp-image-5511" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/000_Par8128400-300x202.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="202" />BURUNDI-POLITICS-UNREST-RADIO</div>
“I grew in a weak society – Burundi. There were too many cases of human rights violations. There was a bad conception of power in the minds of the politicians and authorities. Then, I had a dream of becoming a lawyer or a policeman to reduce all those cases of injustice. But when I graduated in university I realized that those two sectors were the most corrupt in Burundi. Then I decided to join the African Public Radio – a voice-of-the-voiceless radio – we documented human rights violations against the members of the public,” says Rugurika.
Mathatha Tsedu, an adjunct professor at Wits and veteran journalist, said Burundian officials were at the university looking for Rugurika. They wanted him arrested because he is a fugitive in his country.
In January 2015, Rugurika was held for more than a month after he interviewed a former government soldier who was in hiding. The soldier was part of the paramilitary who were allegedly instructed by the government officials to murder three Italian nuns who worked in Burundi. Rugurika’s case caught the attention of the international civil community, and thousands of Burundians demanded his release. He was released in March.
Burundi was supposed to go the polls in 2015, but the government decided to use its paramilitary to threaten civilians who protested the decision to stall elections. The Italian nuns were witnesses and ready to testify, so the national intelligence decided to kill them, said Rugurika.
“Since 2010, they tried to corrupt several journalists. I am not accusing my colleagues. Some are victims of this corruption, they fear for their lives if they refuse to take the money. It was the same case with me&#8230; They told me I have two choices, either I take the money, or face jail, or be killed. I refused the money and risked being killed. Deep in my heart I decided to publish the reports (about the death of nuns). It was my contribution to show the world that we have a criminal government. I don’t have fear to state that,” he says.
“The government didn’t release me to give me my freedom, they planned to kill me. On 29 March (2015) three armed guys were sent to kill me in my home. Fortunately, they went to look for me in a neighbor’s home.”
Rugurika went into exile in neighboring Rwanda and later Brussels.
Rugurika says before the government started persecuting journalists, there were attempts to enforce a law for journalists to reveal sources, but Burundians fought against it. This failure led to the formation of Rema FM, a government propaganda radio station. All the independent media houses were banned and are under police surveillance.
It may be unsafe for journalists like Rugurika for some time yet.

‘They Planned  To Kill Me’

The highlight of my six-month long journalism fellowship in Jersey City, New York, was waking to the madness of the US 2016 election primaries. As an African socialist in New York, the campaign of 76-year-old Bernie Sanders, the Democratic Party’s unlikely socialist candidate, alongside Hillary Clinton, had me glued to my television. Sanders had chutzpah as well as frailty. Downtown Jersey City was the hub of electioneering, with youthful socialists of all skin hues, LGBTQ, mavericks and hippies, wearing Sanders badges and wrapped in flags emblazoned: Bernie 2016: Feel The Bern (with red fire). Until the late hours, in beer-fuelled jamborees, we danced in the streets to Fire Is Ours, a song by Hawaiian-musician, Makana. It was also Sanders’ anthem. I want to believe the first four lines got me hooked to the noble campaign. It reminded me of a song back home: “My mother was a kitchen girl, my father was a garden boy…”
&nbsp;
I’ve been lied to. Misled.
Built up by what they said,
Lifted only to be let down,
I’ve been taken for a ride.
&nbsp;
Sanders is an odd creature. I don’t give a fig about politics outside my motherland – Africa – but I couldn’t resist the charm of a man who showed the corporates the middle finger. My Zambian friend, Sam, who had been in the US for seven years, gave me a crash course on this Vermont senator. “Bernie will not be dictated to. This campaign is free of corporate influence,” says the man from Lusaka.
Apparently, our man refused to set up a political action committee that allows corporations and businesses to fund candidates and influence them. I was told Sanders had been a thorn in the posterior of big businesses and Wall Street, as he opted for faceless independent voter’s funding.
On June 7, a cold Tuesday, it was primary elections. I watched Sanders’ supporters accosting and hollering at voters from Grove Street train station, downtown Jersey City, from 6AM to 8PM. From my vantage point, there were no Clinton people in sight. But the opposite was true in other parts of the State of New Jersey – Clinton thumped Sanders by 63.2% to 36.8%. That was the end of his campaign, but the fire didn’t die. In subsequent rallies, Clinton got burned by aggrieved democrats who thought the elections were rigged. Sam from Lusaka was convinced Clinton was an evil politician, hence he never supported her in the first place. He thought Sanders was robbed, I didn’t. It was unthinkable that US elections can be rigged – that’s an African thing, I thought.
Fire Is Ours fizzled out. Now the spotlight shifted to Clinton and Donald Trump, the Republican candidate, whom I knew as a businessman who steadfastly refused to disclose his tax returns. I heard he was not legally bound to do so – but that’s something candidates had done in the past nine elections. Sam and I loathed the two candidates from the comfort of our street corner bar.
I was still unconvinced by Sam’s assertions about Clinton, because her husband, Bill, the former president, was a friend of South Africa and was here at the dawn of our democracy.  When he hobnobbed with Nelson Mandela, Hillary was in tow. But it took a Democracy Now! television interview with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, saying something about emails, to give me a change of heart.
When Assange was asked who was the lesser evil, he retorted: “Well, you are asking me, do I prefer cholera or gonorrhoea?”
Sam and his peers found the reply apt. Both the diseases and the c

I felt the Bern

There can’t be too many days when you start work climbing down a ladder, with a government spy, into a dingy underground shaft in search of a torture chamber. This was how the meandering road of journalism took me to tunnels and bunkers deep beneath Lusaka, the capital of Zambia, on a sunny day in September 1995.
A few hours earlier I had been sitting at the presidential palace with the diminutive former President Frederick Chiluba. He assured me, with his peculiar trademark expression of rolling his eyes so all you could see was their whites, that we would see shocking evidence of torture in the days of his predecessor Kenneth Kaunda.
At the time, Kaunda had been a thorn in the side of Chiluba and was staging a political comeback. To give Chiluba his due, the union leader had ousted Kaunda, fair and square, at elections on a wave of votes of people fed up with food shortages and autocratic tendencies from the old man. It ended Kaunda’s 27-year reign since the day Zambia won independence on October 24, 1964. KK or Super Ken, as they called him in the copper belt, was determined to fight back at the 1996 elections and was going to wring out every bit of popularity he had as well as making a nuisance of himself to the people in power.
<div id="attachment_3519" style="width: 215px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-3519" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="size-medium wp-image-3519" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Par1766006-1-205x300.jpg" alt="" width="205" height="300" />Zambia&#8217;s former president Frederick Chiluba gives the thumbs up outside the Magistrates Courts on Febrauary 15, 2008 in Lusaka after the court ruled today that Chiluba should face a corruption trial in May. Chiluba would have to show cause why he should not be convicted on charges of theft of public funds and abuse of office, prosecutor Mutembo Nchito told AFP after the ruling by Lusaka Magistrate Jones Chinyama.</div>
In response, Chiluba threw mud at Kaunda from every angle. He tried to deport the old man to Malawi with a bizarre claim that the former head of state was not a Zambian – his father, a Church of Scotland vicar, was born in Malawi. In 1998, there was a misprision of treason trial where Kaunda was charged with failing to inform authorities of a treasonous act. Kaunda, who spent nine months in prison during the independence struggle, was to spend many more months behind bars on remand and grew a bushy Father Christmas white beard in protest. Appropriate, since he was arrested on Christmas Day.
“These are frightened little men trying to hurt me,” was one of Kaunda’s phrases of the time.
This was the scene on the surface on that day I walked into the dim tunnels built by engineers from the former Yugoslavia in the days when Lusaka was under attack for sheltering guerrillas from neighboring Zimbabwe and South Africa.
It was a bit like walking down a mine as the shaft led downward, in a gentle incline. There were lights here and there perched in the rock; every now and then there was a room off the main tunnel. We had the camera ready to get shots of the torture chamber; we found… nothing. If there was a torture chamber it was well hidden.
We scoured the underground bunkers and all we found was a radio station with a five-kilowatt transmitter, lots of damp carpets and rotting wood, what looked like a council chamber and rooms filled with bunk beds; little else.
We emerged at the other end of the long tunnel, which came out at the presidential palace, puzzled. Why had Chiluba sent us on a wild-goose chase? There was anecdotal evidence from a Major Ronald Chansa who told of being held and tortured in the tunnels for 21 days in 1981.
Afterwards, we headed for Kaunda’s home in Lusaka to ask the question about torture.
“If I see a spider in the bath I will take it out before I put my water there,” says Kaunda in denying the charge.
“Maybe there were one or two over-zealous policeman, here and there, but I can say I know nothing of torture.”
Maybe.
Chiluba faced corruption charges after his term in office and died in June 2011. Chansa, if there was such a man, never spoke out again. Kaunda, who famously grabbed the microphone to make a tribute at Nelson Mandela’s funeral in December 2013, is alive and well, living in Lusaka. He pulled out of the 1996 election at the last minute and never stood again and was acquitted of misprision of treason.
Maybe between the three, lies the truth about the bunkers deep below Lusaka.
&nbsp;

Deep Under The Earth  In Search Of A Dark Secret

It was nine days of hell that Ray Choto will never forget. Live electric wires were pushed into his genitals; it was so excruciating that he snapped the chain of his handcuffs. With his editor, Mark Chavunduka, he was stripped and blindfolded at a military base in Cranborne, a suburb of Harare. Their captors shoved their heads in drums of water. They were forced to do push-ups in the rain, in between beatings, and afterwards their torturers kicked them through the wet grass to clean off the blood.
It all began because of a news story the now late Chavunduka, founding editor of The Standard, Zimbabwe’s independent Sunday newspaper, and Choto, the newspaper’s former chief investigative reporter, wrote in January, 1999 that 23 soldiers, including seven officers, were under arrest for inciting their comrades to overthrow president Robert Mugabe. The authorities wanted to know who leaked the story. The two young African men suffered at the hands of their own people but never revealed their sources.
“As a journalist, my responsibility is to protect my sources. Even if it meant that I was going to be thrown into jail or killed. I was ready for it in defense of ethical journalism,” says Choto, 15 years on.
“The torture was very barbaric. I was handcuffed, put in leg irons, and tortured by way of electric shocks all over my body. They also hit me with wooden planks, clenched fists &#8230;”
Their crime? According to Choto, it was allegedly contravening a section of the Law and Order Maintenance Act. They challenged the constitutional validity of the controversial colonial law and the Zimbabwe Supreme Court declared the provision null and void and the case fell away.
Both were flown to London for psychological and physical treatment. In May 2000, Choto received further treatment in Australia.
Contrary to reports that he fled Zimbabwe, Choto explains that he went to the United States (US) on September 6, 2000 to take up the prestigious John S. Knight Fellowship for professional journalists at Stanford University in California. It was during his first year at the university that Mugabe’s government introduced strict laws that made it difficult for journalists to work.
The program appointed Choto as a senior fellow, extending his stay in the US for another year. This came at a time when Zimbabwe’s government news publications labeled Choto an enemy of the state. He cites an article that detailed a press conference, held by the military and the police, in which they warned the independent media that they were ready to treat those that write negatively about Zimbabwe the same way they treated Choto and Chavunduka.
Choto went home on the first of day of 2002 and planned to be in Zimbabwe for eight days. A senior source in the military agreed to secretly meet him at a hotel in Harare. Choto had called him to tell him that he was in the country and asked if he had time to meet for a drink. The military source sounded hesitant, but agreed. They communicated in code in case the phone was bugged. When they met, the military source asked Choto why he came back in dangerous times and told him to leave the country.
Choto got on a plane and left. He then telephoned family and friends to ask whether he should return. All, including his mother, said no. Choto, now 13 years in the US, says he will not go home as long as the ruling party, Zanu-PF, is in power.
“The loss of my mother in May 2010 was, and remains, a thorn in my heart. Unfortunately, I couldn’t go to Zimbabwe to see her laid to rest.”
Now a senior editor at the Voice of America (VOA) in the Africa Division in Washington D.C., Choto says that it is challenging to work on stories from a distance.
As Mugabe begins his seventh term, Choto clings on to hope.
“The solution lies in the hands of the people of Africa. They have to elect democratic leaders and reject undemocratic leaders who come to power through chicanery.”
You have to listen to a man who shed blood for his beliefs.   FL

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Bloodied But Unbowed:  The Journalist Prepared To Die

It’s a sunny day in the judicial capital of South Africa, Mangaung—formerly known as Bloemfontein—but inside the country’s highest court of appeal, the temperature is rising. Media conglomerate Media24, with one of its specialist journalists, Jan de Lange, are first respondents to a case against one of the biggest mining companies in the world, BHP Billiton.
The London Stock Exchange-listed company is appealing a decision by the Gauteng High Court, which declared that they should divulge the details of their contract with Eskom. The contract might reveal that BHP Billiton is actually paying very little for electricity and that the public is subsidizing their consumption.
It is big money. In his application to the High Court, de Lange mentioned, among other things: “It appears that the contracts are responsible for at least part of Eskom’s R3.2 billion ($368 million) operating loss for the year ended March 31, 2009 and the whole of its projected loss on embedded derivates of R9.5 billion ($1.1 billion) going forward.”.
It all started in 1995 after de Lange joined Media24 as a specialist reporter in the business division, Sake24.
“It was the first story I went out to when we made the trip to Eshowe for the opening of a power station; it was here that they announced that Hillside and Gencor were to become Eskom’s biggest private client. When it came to the question and answer section of the presentation, we wanted to know how much Gencor was paying for electricity. We were not given an answer. I then started following this issue closely because you could feel that something was not right,” de Lange says.
Gencor was, at the time, one of South Africa’s biggest mining companies. Under its control it had, amongst others, Impala Platinum, Goldfields and Billiton. The company was unbundled and Billiton changed its focus to non-precious metals under the leadership of former Gencor head, Brian Gilbertson.
“At that time Gencor was one of South Africa’s major companies. We were looking for growth opportunities and we identified this aluminum opportunity arising from the country’s surplus electricity at the time,” Gilbertson says from London, where he runs a resources company.
“In order for us to invest $1 billion in South Africa and over $1.5 billion into Mozambique we needed to be confident about the power supply. As part of our risk mitigation, we wanted to know that if the price of aluminum collapsed we [wouldn’t] lose all our money invested in the project and so we did something new in South Africa, which was to link the power price from Eskom to the price of aluminum in the market.”
“This meant that if the aluminum price went down, the cost of our power would go down; if the aluminum price went up, the price would go up. In this way our project would be more viable. Even President Mandela was backing the deal because we were using it to showcase to the world that South Africa would be able to build projects of this size and nature.”
In those days Eskom had a surplus of cheap electricity but this was soon to change when economic and population growth surpassed anticipated figures. BHP Billiton was purportedly doing well as a result of the cheaper tariffs they were charged.
De Lange’s investigations revealed that while the general public was hit hard by tariff increases subsequent to blackouts, BHP Billiton might have been gaining benefit through lower electricity prices.
In 2009, he went to court to try to obtain the details of the contract between Eskom and BHP Billiton.
In August last year, de Lange finally won a ruling in the Gauteng High Court in Johannesburg, which obliged Eskom to release the contract details. Eskom was willing to abide by the ruling. BHP Billiton was not and appealed.
“We have contracts with our customers and those contracts are confidential. The reason Eskom originally contested Jan de Lange’s case was that the contracts were confidential. When we lost the case we agreed to the courts findings,” says Eskom spokesperson, Hilary Joffe.
Eskom has since gone to the National Energy Regulator of South Africa (Nersa) to seek a renegotiation of the electricity supply contract for the Hillside and Bayside smelters after the Mozal Smelter (in Mozambique) deal was successfully renegotiated along with Scorpion Zinc in Namibia.
In the Mangaung courtroom, the two opposing advocates are exploring legal issues and the technical loopholes of each other’s cases.
Advocate Frank Snyckers, on behalf of BHP Billiton, states that his client is unwilling to reveal the details of the case.
“Aluminum pricing information is crucial to keep away from competitors,” he says.
It was revealed that BHP Billiton employs around 1,600 people between the two smelters. Each smelter uses at least 500MW of electricity per year. A large city like Mangaung only uses 400MW. BHP Billiton also uses around 6% of the country’s total electricity consumption.
After four hours of legal sparring, Justice Mthiyane reserved judgment for a later date.
Managing director of EE Publishers, Chris Yelland, was one of only five people in the court’s public gallery today and he is a worried man.
“An Appeal Court is looking at obscure technical issues of a legal nature, which are being used to try and overturn a judgment of the High Court. For me, as a non-lawyer, I find this frustrating. Issues of the rights of South African public are being ignored. It is conceivable that Media24 will lose their case and if so, I hope they will take it to the Constitutional Court,” he says.
I ask de Lange if he will indeed continue fighting if he loses this round. “Of course,” he says, with a smile.

On the Threshold Of The Truth

FORBES AFRICA’s publisher, Rakesh Wahi, is also the co-founder and vice chairman of Africa Business News (ABN), which also owns CNBC Africa.
<div id="attachment_43" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-43" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="size-large wp-image-43" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/FORBES_MAG_027-1024x682.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="316" />Deal of a lifetime: Rakesh Wahi signs the FORBES AFRICA franchise agreement with Gary Alfonso, editor-in-chief; Roberta Naidoo, general manager; and Sid Wahi, project manager in attendance.</div>
<h3>As an entrepreneur in the media space in Africa, why did you choose FORBES AFRICA as your next venture?</h3>
Our vision for ABN from the beginning was to create a business media conglomerate that would have a point of presence in all African countries. The intent is to have a mechanism to aggregate real-time information from across the continent and roll it out in different media, namely television, print and online. Both aggregation and exhibition have to be carried out in tandem to make the business model viable.
The television business was set up in June 2007 with CNBC as our partner. CNBC is a global leader in business television. For the print business we evaluated several options, but the FORBES brand is the one that my partner, Zafar Siddiqi, and I pursued as it is, to our minds, the most inspirational business magazine in the world.
<h3>How did it come about?</h3>
My interaction started with the management of FORBES in June 2008. They had tried to enter the African market earlier but were not able to find the right partnership model, and hence were also waiting for the right opportunity.
As in any business relationship, there was a lot of due diligence requirements and submissions of business plans, etcetera. Our vision and our presence in the business media genre were clearly key factors, which went in our favor.
<h3>What did the process entail? Was it complicated or simple?</h3>
The process, by our own requirements, needed us to carry out an in-depth analysis of the print industry in Africa and the gaps that we wanted to fill in a market that was cluttered with a lot of other good quality products. We had to first convince ourselves that there was a demand and secondly, we were well placed to meet that demand. I allocated sufficient resources to making this initial determination.
Our initial findings were positive, with several cautions. We had to work through these red flags to make sure that we had the right answers—firstly, from the perspective of the market, and more importantly, viable commercially, keeping in mind the expectations of FORBES.
I think that in any venture, it’s important to spend a lot of time on getting the fundamentals right. The process, therefore, is not complicated or simple, but is mainly focused on being very thorough. The legal agreements were cumbersome and I had a good team, led by Gary Alfonso and Roberta Naidoo, working with me on the transaction.
While the recession delayed our plans, the real challenges started once we took a decision to launch. My son Sidharth stepped up as the project manager for the business and has worked tirelessly with the team to set the ball in motion. We now have a full team on board, with Chris Bishop leading the charge as managing editor.
<h3>Why did you see FORBES AFRICA particularly as an opportunity? Isn’t print journalism a dying breed in the world of publishing?</h3>
I would not have ventured into this business without having the synergies with our existing business. We have operating synergies in the business news genre and this was the primary consideration. Zafar and I spent a lot of time with our shareholders and management team to analyze issues and came up with a plan that we thought would work.
<div id="attachment_42" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-42" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="size-large wp-image-42" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_5509-2-1024x683.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="316" />Co-founder and Chairman Zafar Siddiqi with publisher and co-founder Rakesh Wahi</div>
Keeping in mind media consumption habits of the future and recognizing that the future lies in hand-held devices, we have a strategy on building the subscription model via the internet. The shape of the final product will be revealed in the not-so-distant future and is being worked on together with our partners in New York.
<h3>What’s your vision for a media group that now owns the Africa distribution rights of two of the most powerful business news brands in the world?</h3>
Our vision remains unchanged on our ambition to be Africa’s most powerful business media conglomerate. We are expanding our geographic network and will have a physical presence in 10 African countries by 2012 and 18 countries by 2014.
We see ourselves looking at distribution as a means to achieve our goals for viewership and will be seeking partnerships on terrestrial networks across Africa, and where possible, acquire networks.
On the print side, we are interested in adding to our stable and will seek other titles that we can bolt into our business to achieve efficiencies and additional economies of scale.
On the internet side, we are building great momentum on ABN Digital (www.abndigital.com) and via YouTube, where more than one million views of our content have been downloaded. Evolution of the telecoms sector will bring about a lot of changes in the delivery of content and we are making all the necessary arrangements to be there when that happens.
<h3>What’s your view on Africa as a marketplace? And the future of the media industry on the African continent?</h3>
Zafar and I are both great believers in the African story. We have been here for seven years now and think that this has been the most incredible learning experience of our lives.
If you analyze Africa without South Africa, you will see the opportunity in every area of economic development. Media is very immature on the continent, from both a reporting and consumption perspective. The revenue drivers are tough; skills are lacking and costs are high. Consequently, there has been limited interest for media companies to push ahead on a pan-African model.
<div id="attachment_44" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-44" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="size-large wp-image-44" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/FORBES_MAG_049-1024x683.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="316" />The FORBES AFRICA team</div>
Our shareholders, like the IDC, share our vision to build the African marketplace. It is my belief that the industry needs to rally behind some common objectives of sharing and building capacity on the continent. Governments have to be active participants in the process of deregulation and being active catalysts to growth, and not become impediments to the free flow of information. Transparency is an inevitable part of economic growth and media will play an important role in shaping the opinion of constituents.
I do believe that we are already adding value to this process and hope that we can achieve all our near-term goals on the continent.
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Tag: Journalism

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