Why this year’s world radio day is especially pertinent to Cameroon
By Hans Ngala
Since 2011, UNESCO set aside February 13 as World Radio Day for all UN member states, which include Cameroon. According to UNESCO, “the objective of World Radio Day is to raise public awareness of the importance of radio and to encourage decision makers to use it to provide access to information, and to improve international co-operation among broadcasters.”
This year’s celebrations are particularly relevant in Cameroon where just a few weeks ago, two radio broadcasters were murdered in the Cameroonian capital within just weeks of each other. It’s also quite significant because it is President Biya’s 90th birthday, but that’s a discussion for later in this article.
Martinez Zogo, a radio presenter with Amplitude FM had taken up his radio programme, Embouteillage (traffic jam), as a platform to name and shame powerful Cameroonians who were milking the country dry at the expense of the Cameroonian tax-payer. Zogo started receiving death threats and on 17 January was kidnapped and his decomposing body was later found at Soa, with clear signs of torture, according to eyewitness accounts.
On February 6, Rev. Jean-Jacques Ola Bebe was also found dead in a pool of his own blood in Mimboman, another neighbourhood in Yaounde. He was also a radio presenter and a priest. After Zogo’s murder, he condemned the killing, little knowing that the same fate would befall him. Both men were vocal critics of the endemic corruption in Cameroon and they used their radio broadcasts to condemn those involved in or abating corruption. They paid the ultimate price.
After Zogo’s killing, there was a media tirade with local and international media churning out reports on an almost daily basis as swift arrests were made and new revelations in relation to the killing were an almost daily occurrence.
Amougou Belinga, the powerful businessman, now in custody in connection to Zogo’s murder, has made attempts to reach the Cameroonian Justice Minister, Laurent Esso; also believed to be involved in Zogo’s killing according to Reporters Without Borders.
World Radio Day this 2023 is a reminder of how powerful radio still remains in the 21st century in spite of the rise of social media. In fact, South African journalist and academic, Prof. Franz Kruger believes that the advent of social media is not a threat to the existence of radio but rather a compliment to it as there is now, ‘online radio’.
As earlier mentioned, this year’s World Radio Day coincides with President Paul Biya’s 90th birthday celebrations. Biya became president in 1982, when most Cameroonians alive today were either still very young or had not been born at all.
Under his 40-year rule, there has been wide celebration of media pluralism but this doesn’t translate to media freedom, with the recent killing of Martinez Zogo just being one of a long trail of journalists either arrested or killed for speaking out against the rich and powerful or for simply interviewing sources as was the case with Ahmed Abba , an RFI radio journalist who was accused by Cameroonian authorities of cooperating with Boko Haram in July 2015. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) condemned Abba’s arrest and drummed for his release.
Cameroon usually scores very low points on the annual Press Freedom Index compiled by Reporters Without Borders. The Index rates how free a country’s media landscape is.
According to US-based Cameroonian scholar Patrice Nganang, the plurality of media outlets in Cameroon does not translate to freedom of the press as authorities are quick to clamp down on any outlets that are critical of the government.
According to Vojvoda, Cameroon has over 100 community radio stations and more than 100 newspapers but getting information from government is not easy.
Radio has the strongest presence in rural parts of Cameroon where TV sets are expensive or getting newspapers is a luxury.
Prior to reunification with French Cameroon, residents of the Southern Cameroons listened to Radio Nigeria Enugu which kept broadcasting into the territory well into the 1970s – nearly a decade after reunification with French Cameroon.
However, radio broadcasting started a lot earlier in French Cameroon. According to E.M. Rogers, a radio station was set up in the early 1940s by French colonial authorities in Douala, but it broke down and when it was revived, the authorities moved it to Yaounde in 1955 and then more radio stations spread across Cameroon later on.
On this World Radio Day, we celebrate the heroic work done by hundreds of Cameroonian radio journalists and fellow radio broadcasters around the world. We salute the bravery of Martinez Zogo and Rev. Ola Bebe and the many journalists who strive to shine the light of democracy and dare to speak truth to power.
