In the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, a channel is striving to stand out from the rest by promoting an editorial policy that brings to the fore daily life as really lived by the majority of Congolese in the region.
According to Reporters Without Borders’ (RSF) 2023 Index of countries where freedom of expression is restricted, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) comes 124th out of 180 countries, with a score of 48.55. Compared to the year 2022 when it was 125th, the country has taken a modest step forward. According to the same source, the country of Félix Tshisekedi, president since 2019, hosts 540 newspapers including 177 television channels, over 4,000 radio stations and 36 online media channels.
But the political context of crises and conflicts that, as this report from the International Crisis Group explains, have rocked the DRC for several years, are obliging the largest country in Sub-Saharan Africa to adopt a new press law which came into force on April 4, 2023.
This law has been well received by press freedom defence NGOs for its would-be liberal credentials, as the radio news network RFI explains:
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It places an obligation on public information repositories to be available to journalists. This will allow journalists access to all types of information, including those relating to elections, and to protect its sources.
It is within this media environment that IciCongo has been born. Global Voices chatted via Whatsapp with its founder Umbo Salama, journalist and maître assistant (assistant lecturer) in the Department of Information and Communication Sciences at the University of the Assumption in Congo (UAC). He explains the context in which this platform was born, its challenges and its future perspectives.
Jean Sovon (JS): Give us an account of the history, the specific content, and the regional aspect of IciCongo in such a huge country!
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Umbo Salama (US): I've started from a few givens. The first is the way foreign media outlets speak of current affairs in the DRC. They speak as if the country was undergoing apocalyptic situations: corruption, war, inter-ethnic conflicts, poverty, famine, rapes, robberies, looting… Yet, alongside this chaotic situation, there are also initiatives for survival, little reported in the media. I told myself that to speak of these initiatives might be a plus to the practice of journalism in the DRC. Hence our slogan “Telling the story of Congo differently.”
The other given is the way online media outlets in the DRC deal with information. A number of channels tend to broadcast information as if they were in competition with the press agencies or social networks. Announcements from or activities of personalities, as well as press releases constitute the greater part of their posts. Outlets seem thus to play the part of propaganda tools for certain personalities. So a space was needed for varied information posts so the population could understand for itself, its situation, its environment, draw inspiration, and make decisions to enable it to thrive.
Friends in the web development field helped me create the site. At the beginning of June 2021, we published the first online articles on www.icicongo.net, with the priority of telling how populations are coming up with ways to survive in this universe often depicted under an apocalyptic guise.
We speak of the economy, of agriculture, of the fight against global warming, of questions of reproductive health, public health, but also of justice, of human trajectories as well as the of the development of the media world.
In two years of existence, IciCongo has walked off with two prizes. The first was the mini-competition in September 2022 held by the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ)'s Pamela Howard Forum for reporting on global crises, won by the article Better informing on terrorism and extremism to stabilize society. The second prize came from the “Jinsia Kwa Amani or Gender for Peace (In French)” competition, organized in December 2022 by the Association des Femmes des Médias (AFEM) and the German cooperation organization GIZ, won by the article With her clippers, Anita Kahambu is re-shaping prejudices about women's entrepreneurship written by Glodi Mirembe.
JS: What is your audience, and how do people read you? What is their feedback like?
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US: I'll start off by saying that it's not that great yet but there are advances in this direction. On our statistics page, we are in the process of identifying our audience, which is expanding greatly beyond our own country, notably in countries like the United States, Belgium and other European countries, but also China, Uganda, Cameroon, and South Africa. In two years of existence, we reckon we're on the right path with an audience on every continent. To get there, we share our articles on various social network platforms, such as WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
The majority of visitors to our site use mobile telephones to read it, and are estimated at 93 percent. Those who use computers represent 5 percent, and tablets, 2 percent. The feedback we receive asks us to continue producing posts which give more hope and enrich knowledge. Others again tell us that our articles enrich their scientific research.
JS: Tell me about the editing team behind this excellent day-to-day work, and about the training and recruitment of journalists in the context of the DRC and the region
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US: We rely heavily on volunteers who want to improve their journalistic writing style. We also rely on our students to whom we offer journalism courses at the University of the Assumption in Congo, UAC. They also benefit from an end-to-end pathway from proposal to release of the article, by way of the development of an angle, the targeting of sources, the editing plan. Our site is also a sort of journalism academy. That's why we call ourselves a “school channel.” But few of them make it, because we don't compose our articles in haste: we take sufficient time to document ourselves properly. And those who do make it get to network and know people in the industry. We also participate regularly in webinars on journalism, and training events initiated by organizations in our region.
JS: What is the situation with press freedom in the DRC?
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US: Up to now, IciCongo hasn't encountered threats in the course of our work yet. But there are too many restrictions that don't allow the whole press in the eastern part of the DRC to carry out their work properly. For example, the government forbids journalists to give a voice on their outlets to perpetrators of attacks, while we are in a zone which is prey to armed conflicts and various forms of extreme violence. We do from time to time abandon certain articles because we are struggling to give a complete presentation issuing from diverse sources. We also have difficulties in getting into certain zones because they are under the control of armed groups.
JS: Where do you see IciCongo in the long term?
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US: Our outlet is situated in a zone, in the east of the country, that straddles the Nile Basin and the Congo Basin. We believe that in five or 10 years’ time we will be among those who continue to be the voice of the voiceless between these two basins, and contributing to the pacification of the zone. Also, we intend to produce audio podcasts and have at our disposal a YouTube channel to grow our audience. It's not easy work, but we'll get there.
Source: Global Voices