Nigerian Journalist Pushes for Freedoms

Nigerian journalist Waziri O. Adio warned a room of students and writers last night at the Kennedy School of Government that there can be no true democracy in Africa unless it is accompanied by freedom of the press.

Adio, one of this year’s Nieman Fellows, was the second speaker in a series on the African media co-sponsored by the Harvard Africans Students Association (HASA) and the Center for International Development.

He challenged what he saw as premature celebration of the rise of democracy in Africa.

“A republic and its press rise and fall together. They are mutually reinforcing concepts.” Adio said.

“There are tensions between journalists and governments all over the world,”

he said. “What distinguishes a democracy from an authoritarian regime is how you manage that tension.”

Unfortunately, Adio told the audience, which included African journalists, many African leaders hide behind the facade of “pseudo-democracies.”

“They’ve been able to outsmart their opponents and the West,” he said.

As a result, Adio said, journalists continue to face both overt and covert suppression of speech.

“There is a struggle between the pen and the sword,” he said. “We journalists like to say that the pen is mightier than the sword. The reality is that in a dictatorship, the pen suffers a lot.”

But Adio made clear that the burden falls on journalists as well as state leaders.

“You can have a free press that can subvert democracy,” he said, calling for critical yet well-informed reporting. “Journalists need to be educated.”

Adio’s call for greater recognition of the obstacles faced by African journalists was echoed by Robert H. Bates, Eaton Professor of the Science of Government, who helped arrange the speaker series.

“Most people in the U.S. push Africa off to the side, like it’s not there. Maybe if Harvard hung out its banner and said, ‘we care about Africa,’ that would change attitudes cross the country,” he said.

“But you’ve got to do it in small steps.”

The speaker series grew out of personal concerns expressed by HASA co-president Alfa Tiruneh ’03.

“I was on BBC and [I read that] in Aedis Ababa, the capitol of Ethiopia, 2000 university students had been arrested for protesting for free speech. Thirty-one were killed in the protest,” Tiruneh said.

“I was just stunned. It was incredible thing that students like myself would be fighting for that.”

Tiruneh said she hopes that the series will encourage people to realize that Africa’s obstacles extend beyond the basic problems of poverty and AIDS.