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Media organizations in Senegal staged a blackout day on Tuesday to protest a authorities crackdown they are saying targets them immediately and is aimed toward curbing press freedoms within the West African nation.
Tv screens went clean on the principle TV stations TFM, ITV and seven TV, and radio retailers reminiscent of RFM and iradio had been silent. A lot of the each day newspapers didn’t publish Tuesday’s editions, aside from the government-owned Le soleil and the personal pro-government WalfQuotidien and Yoor Yoor Bi.
The transfer comes as tensions have been rising between media organizations and the federal government, triggering worldwide considerations over press freedoms in considered one of Africa’s most secure democracies. Individually, Senegal’s predominant media corporations have accrued huge debt over time, threatening the sector’s financial survival.
The Senegalese Council of Press Distributors and Publishers, a company representing each personal and public media corporations, claimed that the federal government had frozen financial institution accounts belonging to the media retailers, allegedly for owing again taxes, “seized manufacturing tools” and “unilaterally and illegally terminated promoting contracts.”
The claims, printed in an editorial in Le Quotidien on Monday, couldn’t be independently verified. Authorities officers weren’t instantly accessible for remark.
“For practically three months, the Senegalese press has skilled one of many darkest phases of its historical past,” the group wrote within the editorial.
In June, Senegal’s Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko, who took workplace earlier this yr, denounced what he described as a “misappropriation of public funds” within the media trade.
Instances of police brutality in opposition to journalists and arrests of presidency critics have additionally elevated in Senegal over the previous few years, in accordance with the worldwide watchdog Reporters With out Borders, which has urged Senegalese authorities to safeguard press freedoms.
The group, recognized by its French acronym RSF, says Senegal fell from the forty ninth to 94th place on its World Press Freedom Index, an annual rating of nations that assesses a number of components, together with a reporter’s skill to work and safety, within the final three years.
“Journalists are usually not sufficiently protected when doing their job and politicians are usually not taking part in their function within the matter,” Sadibou Marong, the West Africa chief at RSF, informed The Related Press. “Even worse, the political forces have jeopardized the suitable to tell and be told.”
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