Africa Ready To Tell The African Story‎

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By ANDnetwork Journalist

African will within a year be having a television network reporting on the continent for the world. Leading business people, broadcasters and journalists have modelled the new network along the lines of Arabic satellite network, Al Jazeera. Salim Amin who is the head of the group said the aim is to tell the African story through Africans. African Television is to raise an initial capital of 35 million US dollars. The network aims to go on air from March in 2007.

Salim Amin the son of the late celebrated Kenyan photographer Mohammed Amin wants to give African journalists a bigger voice in how the continent is presented to the world by setting up the Africa 's first news channel. Amin told the UK Independent early this week that: "We want to show the success stories as well as the failures, and show there is more to us than famines and wars," he said. "We need to remind ourselves, as well as others, that there are people here who are contented with their lives.

"My father always talked about how important it was for Africans to receive news from other Africans."

Driven by this vision of Africans reporting on Africa for the world, a group of professional broadcasters, businesspersons and reporters is pulling their resource together insetting up a Pan-African satellite television.

“My vision is to give a more balanced view of Africa by Africans rather than by foreign correspondents,” Amin told Reuters 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.

The new African channel, which is intended to combine the reach of CNN with the agility of al-Jazeera, will have small bureaus in 50 countries across the continent staffed by well trained local journalists.

The channel would begin by airing around six hours of news a day, and eventually turn into a 24-hour news channel. With the cost of broadcast technology falling rapidly, it is also easier to start up a news channel on a lower budget.

Amin is in London to drum up interest and investment in the venture, noted that U.S. 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.

Several African news organisations including the Johannesburg based African News Dimension have already pledged their support and are founding members of the venture.

A.N.D/Ethiopia Herald

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