By Babatunde Rashid
I have just watched a recorded news carried by CNN on the elections in Sierra Leone and I was left with a few questions. By the way, the reporter, Stephanie Busari, has a great reputation as a journalist in Nigeria and beyond. That is not to say we can’t ask questions if we believed that an ‘editorial subjectivity’ was a possibility.
I might not be a journalist, but I have read a bit of sociology that is enough to bring me closer to the way journalists prepare and sell their commodity, the news. Mostly, I am told, they use objectivity as their key selling point. What I would later understand from the employ of journalistic objectivity, is that a story is said to be fair and balanced when the right to reply is almost equal to the claims being responded to. So, let’s see what proportion of the story is equal to what.
In the report aired and repeated in the last 24 hours, we see the anchor, Michael Holmes, announcing the story with a cue in that reads “Sierra Leoneans are expected to head to the polls on Saturday [June 24] to choose their next president. The vote coming as the country is caught in an economic crisis with inflation and unemployment soaring and the country’s currency plunging in value. Our Stephanie Busari with the latest”.
She opens her report with supporters of the opposition All People’s Congress shouting and she refers to them as the Sierra Leoneans “calling out for change as the West African state heads to the polls”. I am not surprised that CNN wants the world to believe that Sierra Leone operates on another planet and therefore not affected by the twin shocks of Covid-19 and the Russian-Ukranian war that have compounded the economic situations across the world.
When Sierra Leone recently benefitted from the final disbursement of the Extended Credit Facility, the government received USD$20.7 million, and the IMF stressed the point that they were giving the money after their review at a critical moment when the global economy was facing many challenges, many shocks from the pandemic, and spillovers from the Russian-Ukraine war.
In one of the pieces, I read in May of this year, the Executive Director of the IMF, Willie Nakunyada, told the President of Sierra Leone that the crisis “… has affected many of our countries in terms of their import bills and their prices for food, fuel, and other sources of energy. But I am delighted that this discussion [with Sierra Leone] is proceeding to set a strong foundation for this review and also for subsequent IMF engagements”.
The IMF boss was also deliberate when he told Sierra Leone’s President that “in particular, the difficult reforms that your government is taking at this time are commendable, especially the revenue measures to try and take care of fiscal discipline and generate adequate revenue flows, to ensure the fiscal position remains on a sustainable path”.
As I said earlier, I am not a journalist, but having lived abroad for a while, I would imagine that these statements from IMF were worth referencing in the report, at least to balance the narrative around their position on inflation.
I have a journalist friend, with whom I discussed the report, and I registered my misgivings. But his response was that the Western Media, like CNN and others, believe that they should side with the afflicted, the underdog and the vulnerable. I further asked if that meant that they knew the opposition APC was losing the elections and so they needed to comfort it? He said he had never thought about it that way.
However, if, out of a population of 3.3 million people who registered to vote, the report could only draw its legitimacy from a small group of dancing opposition party supporters, to reinforce the belief that there was widespread anger at the current state of the country, leading to the August 10 violence in 2022. Granted that I see CNN quoting an old broadcast of President Julius Maada Bio following the protests, to account for a government or ruling party position. Interesting!
The President thinks the attack on the state, its properties and its people was not a protest. “This was not a protest against the high cost of living. The chant of the insurrectionists was for a violent overthrow of the democratically elected government…”
“59-year-old Maada Bio, singing and dancing in the rain on the campaign trail has promised, if re-elected, to feed the nation and create half a million jobs,” quoting a portion of the video report. Imagine the imagery of a President standing in the rain to address his people, albeit during the campaign period. Imagine how some other media house would tell that story.
It probably doesn’t matter now, because I already have my misgivings about how the Western media creates and pushes a narrative that carries the semblance of altruism. Anyways, next time I see another report that looks like this one, I will try to run it through more people who look beyond the reports to assess the human interest side of it.
