“Training journalists with UK and US help”

or is it a case of cheque-book colonialism?

Is this a case of cheque-book journalism or is it a case of cheque-book colonialism? Not only that. Let us ask what “human rights” these colonialists in USA and UK know to be “training”, or should we say brainwashing, young impressionable African youth?

This week the USA has invaded some Iraqi newsroom and arrested the editor. Last year, they bombed the offices of Al-Jazeera TV to get it off air. Africa’s own firebrand pan-Africanist and pre-eminent journalist, Baffour Ankomah of Baffour’s Beef (NewAfrican Magazine), spoke of how the Guardian and the Times of London  would not publish his letters to the editor on Robert Mugabe because they don’t agree with the contents of the letter. 

I say it here with utmost seriousness, that the Western white middle-class media is the most self-censured media in the world. I have lived there as a so-called “radical African” for 30 years and I know.

Their middle-class media have made their own world-view a religion. If you see the world even slightly from the way they see it, you are a heretic. For example, Mr. US Ambassador and Mr. UK High Commissioner: can I respectful suggest that your prison systems are a Gulag destroying Black males in your respective countries? Any chance that we may have a “human rights” debate on this? Or what about the reporting of the human rights violations by the USA and UK in Iraq and Afghanistan? Don’t we destroy millions of peoples lives over there and then coin a disgraceful term for it when we call it “collateral damage”?

Respectfully, you should not be “training” our young people on so-called “human rights”. You shoul work through the established government of this sovereign country, and the relevant department, to offer training that is biased-value free - e.g. training on reporting on our much respected national development agenda.

Media Agenda & Gambia Press Union

GPU is the formal body representing the media fraternity in The Gambia. Media Agenda is a private organisation collecting funds from abroad to “train journalists”.

Both organisations are headed by the same individual in the person of Mr. Madi MK Ceesay.

In a short interview yesterday, Mr. Ceesay denied that there is any conflict of interest in his being both the President of GPU and being the Founding Director of Media Agenda.

Respectfully we beg to disagree. If the MD of the Daily Observer set up a seperate private newspaper of his own, the Observer board would certainly see a conflict of interest. Both Media Agenda and the GPU try to raise as much money from abroad as possible.

Who will Mr. Ceesay favour? Media Agenda pays him “allowances”, he says, but GPU does not. Mr. Ceesay also travels abroad alot and we hear that the GPU does pay for his travel. Whose business does Mr. Ceesay travel on? GPU or Media Agenda’s.

Many such question do definely arise and we think Mr. Ceesay should either run the GPU or the Media Agenda outfit, but not both.