Newspaper publishers petition Prime Minister

BY ATIA TILARIOUS AZOHNWI

Newspaper publishers under the banner of the Cameroon Anglophone Newspaper Publishers’ Association- CANPA have requested the Prime Minister and Head of Government to repeal a 1995 decision.

During a press conference in Yaoundé on Friday, November 29, CANPA Secretary General, Ojong Steven in a press statement revealed that, “...in 1995, the then Prime Minister, Head of Government, Simon Achidi Achu, in a bid to rescue the national bilingual daily Cameroon Tribune from financial hardship, signed a decision instructing all government departments and state-run companies to put all official announcements and other texts exclusively in Cameroon Tribune.”

CANPA regrets the fact that this decision is still being applied until this day very religiously by a good lot of administrations, although the context has evolved 18 years after.

The Anglophone newspaper publishers say if not repealed at this point, and urgently so, the Prime Minister’s decision has the potential to send the private print media out of business, in a set up where all rely mainly on government agencies for commercials.

“the circular needs to be reversed with immediate effect as we enter the year 2014; one of the defining periods in the Head of State’s Major Accomplishments Programme. It shall be noble for the Prime Minister, Head of Government, to take another instrument backtracking on the earlier decision,” the CANPA statement reads in part.

“It is based on the 1995 Prime Ministerial Decision that structures like the Ministry of Public Contracts, SNH, ART and a lot others do business only with Cameroon Tribune, whereas private newspaper owners pay heavy taxes and the money is used to pay subventions to SOPECAM,” the CANPA statement reads further.

“The Ministry of Finance which had in the past functioned with the private print media, this 2013, took the said decision as a pretext to sideline the private print media, making things economically unbearable for actors in the sector,” Ojong Steven bemoaned in the CANPA press statement.

“We do not want Cameroon Tribune to stop taking commercials; all we want is a level play ground where all the papers compete freely, like it is the case in the audio visual sector where CRTV is not given undue advantage,” the preliminary remarks at the CANPA confab elucidates.

The CANPA request is coming at a time when some newspaper publishers are faced with untold misery, forcing some well-minded journalists to become masters of blackmail and other attendant vices, all in the name of survival.

CANPA as well maintains the positions already taken by the Cameroon Association of English Speaking Journalists, CAMASEJ and CJA- Cameroon following the suspension of some media organs and their publishers by the National Communication Council, while yet others were warned for various reasons.

These sanctions, they say, are coming at a time all hands are being put on deck in Cameroon by media professionals and all related associations to get the government to decriminalize press offences and enact a Freedom of Access to Information Act and fall in line with an avowed desire by actors in the sector to see the respect of journalism ethics reinforced.

The newspaper publishers are now watching the star building for the Prime Minister to act, and act fast.