How African governments use advertising as a weapon against media freedom

This is part of a much broader strategy for political control which Africanist historians and political scientists have called the “ideology of order”.

This is based on the premise that dissent is a threat to nation building and must therefore be diminished.

The narrative was popularised by most post-independence African governments and emphasized through incessant calls for what they liked to call “unity”.

In Kenya, former president Daniel Moi even coined his own political philosophy of “peace, love and unity”.

Citizens were expected to accept this narrative unequivocally.

Dissenting views were undermined through state-controlled media such as Kenya Broadcasting Corporation and newspapers such as the Kenya Times.

From the 1960s – 1980s, African governments conveniently used the nation-building argument to suppress legitimate dissent.

Opposition was punished by imprisonment, forced exile and even death.

This was common practice in Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, and in West Africa more generally.

The current political climate on the continent is premised on constitutional safeguards including the protection of free speech which make these kinds of punishments unlikely in the present day.

Many countries now have institutional safeguards including fairly robust judicial systems capable of withstanding the tyranny of naked state repression.

As a result, the media is controlled in subtler ways and its violence is softer.

It’s against this background that I interpret the withdrawal of government adverts from the commercial media in Kenya.

In Kenya, the decision followed a special cabinet meeting which agreed that a new newspaper would be launched to articulate the government agenda more accurately.

The government also argued that the move was part of an initiative to curb runaway spending by lowering advert spend in Kenya’s mainstream media and directing all the money to the new title.

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