Driven by the vision of Africans reporting on Africa for the world,
a group of professional broadcasters, business people and reporters is setting
up a pan-African satellite television network, to be launched within a year.
January 18 2006 at 06:24PM
By Jeremy Lovell
London - Driven by the vision of Africans reporting on Africa for the world,
a group of professional broadcasters, business people and reporters is setting
up a pan-African satellite television network, to be launched within a year.
Modelled on Arabic satellite network al Jazeera and led by Salim Amin, son
of legendary Kenyan photojournalist Mo Amin, Africa TV aims to be an independent
voice reporting on all events - good and bad - to the continent and the rest
of the world. "My vision is to give a more balanced view of Africa by Africans
rather than by foreign correspondents," Amin said on Wednesday. "The
way the international 24-hour news machine works the big networks have a lot
of other big stories that need to be covered and they can't devote the resources
that I believe are necessary to cover Africa properly," he added.
Amin, in London to drum up interest and investment in the venture, noted that
United States news network CNN and Britain's Sky Television had just one African
bureau each while the BBC has four to cover the continent's 53 countries. "With
those few bureaux you can't really be everywhere, and what they do concentrate
on is the big news stories and they are unfortunately usually the ones about
war, famine, corruption and HIV," he added. "We are not here to do
PR for Africa. But we want to balance the hard news stories with stories about
the successes on the continent - the people, the fashion, the entertainment,
the sport, the music," he added. Amin pointed to the booming middle class
eager for news about fellow Africans, and the large African diaspora anxious
to keep track of news from home but offered scant means to do so. The aim is
to eventually have a small television crew in every African capital broadcasting
in an array of the continent's multiplicity of languages. But when the channel
goes on air it will initially only be in English and French and is unlikely
to cover more than half of Africa.
Amin acknowledged that others had tried and failed, but said that new technology
from mobile phones to the Internet made it easier and cheaper to produce a service
and avoid interference from governments known for their dislike of independent
media. "Through these means as well as standard television and radio we
are hoping we can get the message out to the majority of people," he said.
"If we can at least make a little bit of a dent and get Africans talking
to each other... we can put pressure on governments to be accountable as al
Jazeera has done," he added. Hoping to raise initial capital of up to $35-million
(about R210-million), ATV aims to be testing by the end of December this year
and on air from March 6, 2007.
But in the meantime Amin and his team have to put together a watertight business
plan. "We are convinced this is feasible. But we need the business plan
to prove it," he said. "We will be reporting without fear or favour.
That is the goal and the vision. I don't know if it is possible, but I think it is."
