Radio, Africa's Major Media

"Radio is not simply the most popular form of media in sub-Saharan Africa, but it is also the only media widely accepted in rural areas. Furthermore, the radio is undoubtedly the only "Africanised" means of communication, although international radios continue to exercise substantial influence. Unlike television, mostly broadcast in big cities, along with many foreign networks that in many countries are controlled by the state (although there are also private networks), radios experience everywhere the end of monopoly and evolve towards extensive pluralism.

Since the end of the 1980s the intensification and aggravation of the economic and social crisis, of poverty and inequalities made populism and corruption intolerable, leading to protests against single-party regimes, while the state media itself were affected by a crisis of legitimacy, and were losing credibility in the eyes of their audience. Pressure by foreign states and international institutions, calling for better management and democratistion, prompted to recognis the multiparty system, which implied in its turn the need for plural information means.

Having said that, the often chaotic liberalistion of the press, marked at the beginning of the 1990s by the emergence as well as the prohibition of numerous newspapers, different impulses aggravating the antagonisms in addition to the fact that the radio reached a wider audience prompted the governments to postpone the liberalisation of radios and to regulate it: in most states, private radios have emerged less than ten years ago. The radio, which is the major African media, inspires simultaneously hope and illusion; it presents the challenges as well as the disparities between states and inside states."

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