Welcome address by Francis Mdlongwa, Director of Highway Africa and of the Sol Plaatje Institute (SPI) for Media Leadership, Rhodes University, at the opening of the 2021 virtual Highway Africa summit conference on 21 June 2021
Thank you for the music Lwandiso. Lwandiso is our multi-media expert at the School of Journalism and Media Studies. The last sound which he played is ‘Island Beat’ by Arulo, which formally marks the start of our summit
conference.
The Vice Chancellor of Rhodes University, Dr Sizwe Mabizela; Deans and Heads of Departments who are present, the Head of the School of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University, Professor Anthea Garman, and all of you very distinguished guests from across the world.
To paraphrase U.S. President Joe Biden, who spoke in November 2020 on America’s somewhat muddled foreign policy when he announced new members of his foreign policy team, let me say that Highway Africa is Back – and thank God!
I therefore warmly greet and welcome all of you to this, the 2021 virtual Highway Africa summit conference. We are meeting today and over the next two days in an extraordinary moment in history where, although we are all together at this conference, we remain physically and socially separated by Covid-19, which has upended our work, our lives and our very existence across this our beautiful earth.
As social beings who are accustomed to meeting and interacting face-to-face, this is a moment of reckoning for humanity like no other in the past century. We are living witnesses to a new era in human existence where our vulnerabilities to what Nassim Taleb (2007) called ‘The Black Swan events’ have been glaringly exposed as deeply inadequate by the Covid-19 pandemic. It is an era where all of us, together, need to forge and build a new global compact of solidarity and resilience to reclaim our lives because if one of us is not safe, no one is safe in this inter-connected and networked world.
The 2021 Highway Africa summit is not just being redefined by the pandemic. Covid-19 has decimated mainstream media and journalism across the world, adding to a decades-long financial and economic crisis that has now brought
media and journalism to their knees.
This summit marks a turning moment for humanity who face a few global technological monopolies which have arrogated to themselves the power and agency to be the leaders of a ‘new world’ and who tell us what we must know, when, how and why, and what we must not know, when and why and yet they are not elected by anyone.
These tech companies also decide what must be considered as truth and not truth, and they have turned every activity and emotions of our lives into data which they sell to advertisers and third parties as their thriving business models, taking advantage of the need by humans to be socially connected. Let me be clear, while these global platforms such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft are profiting from our data and reshaping the world according to their priorities, we as the citizens of the world have not been without blemish.
We have willingly given these companies our precious personal data in exchange for receiving freebies of sorts and yet, as all of us know only too well, there is simply nothing like a free lunch. Our data and attention spans are these platforms’ single biggest assets and we have just given these to them on a silver platter! If anything, they should be paying us for using our data and attention, and not the other way round!
However, we have actively aided and boosted their businesses to a point where we now find it hard to regulate their activities to be in line with humanity’s long-standing values and ethos, where truth was once based on evidence and facts, and where an individual’s intimate personal privacy details once remained private. In other words, these companies now regard themselves to have become bigger than the world itself and too big to fail, and they are consuming us in every sense each and every day of our once ordered and predictable lives!
For the news media and journalism across the globe, these tech giants have gobbled up most of the twin revenue streams that have sustained media and journalism for nearly two centuries – that is, revenue from advertisers and audiences. And yet again in this example, the media and journalists must look themselves in the mirror to explain why they wittingly gave these global tech firms their valuable news content and information without any strategic thought of how the media would ‘monetize’ the audiences on these platforms. In a world where audiences face a bewildering choice of news to consume, when and on which platforms, our increasingly promiscuous audiences have
deserted mainstream media and flocked to the platforms who promise them instantaneous gratification and success in the so-called sharing economy which, by the way, is not s ared by these platforms.
The platforms have failed to respond candidly to growing worldwide concerns about their lack of transparency and accountability, including not paying taxes in most jurisdictions from which they operate and, in some cases, of being the main culprits that fan disinformation, misinformation and outright lies. Instead, they have been giving out little alms of funds ostensibly to revive news media in distress. They have significantly refused to share their vast profits as
part of their conscious and purposeful social corporate investment that must put People and Planet on the same pedestal as that of their own Profits. I must therefore applaud the Australian government and its news media which earlier this year forced Google and Facebook to reach acceptable agreements with the media there on how these platforms would pay for the news that they siphon from Australia’s news media. But Australia’s bold example and others that have been recently seen in France will remain ineffective if other governments across the world don’t unite and follow Australia’s tough legal steps to insist on these platforms to pay a fair share for the news that they get mostly for free from the news media. Lest it be forgotten, high-quality and credible news content is the pillar of a thriving democracy and it costs a great deal of money to produce and disseminate by already financially-stressed news media, which have had to retrench tens of thousands of workers across the world, while hundreds of media outlets have had to shut down completely leaving ‘news deserts’ and ‘ghost newspapers’ in their wake across the world, according to media researcher Penelope Abernathy, writing in 2020.
This summit, among its important outcomes, must be to conscientize the world to urgently kick-start a heightened global conversation for the platforms to be regulated in the public interest because they have increasingly taken over the work of media as the main providers of news and information, as well as being the fasters super-spreaders of misinformation and disinformation, especially Facebook, according to research published by the journal Nature: Human Behaviour (Travers, 2020).
While legislating for the good governance of these platforms, governments must also remain alert not to simultaneously give ammunition to autocratic regimes around the world to use such legislation as a cover to stifle media freedom and silence critical journalism, as we have already witnessed in several countries which are too numerous to list here.
Let this summit therefore be a launchpad by Africa and the world to take visible, implementable and legally enforceable legislation that will foster a more equitable, fairer, just and ethical media and journalism eco-system, and the first step to do so is to regulate these platforms without fear or favour. For the African continent in particular, it is time that Africa woke up from its deep slumber, took up its rightful place and responsibilities among the world’s
nations, and started not only to dream again but to live again, to paraphrase the Senegalese musical star Youssouf N’Dour’s famed rendition of ‘Africa Dream Again’.
As the American-Canadian writer William Gibson stated in 1991 and repeated it in 2003, ‘’the future is already here…it’s just not evenly distributed’. So let us who are gathered here today not perpetuate this unacceptable inequity but take bold and creative steps that will result in African media and journalism leveraging technology to transform themselves to become relevant, truthful and accurate voices of our people once again. Our media and journalists need to carve out and create their own future by transforming their business models, business strategies and business tactics that place audiences at the very heart of their operations or say goodbye to their craft and profession.
Let me close by sincerely thanking all the members of the Highway Africa Steering Committee for their hard work, passion and commitment to relaunch Highway Africa after it paused for two years for a variety of reasons. Above all, let me thank each and every one of you for gracing us with your socially-distanced presence and for your enduring support not just for Highway Africa but for the greater cause of an unfettered, vibrant and reformed news media in an increasingly hyper-competitive media landscape.
Thank you for giving me your attention. Enkosi. Siyabonga. Ke a leboga. Asante sana. Merci beaucoup!
END OF WELCOME NOTE BY HGHWAY AFRICA AND SPI DIRECTOR FRANCIS MDLONGWA
References
Abernathy, P.M. (2020). News Deserts and Ghost Newspapers: Will Local News Survive? Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, pages 1-120.
Taleb, N.N. (2007). The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Allen Lane (U.K.): Random House.
Travers, M. (2020). Facebook spreads fake news faster than any other social website, according to new research. Available from: https://www.forbes.com/sites/traversmark/2020/03/21/facebook-spreads- fake-news-faster-than-any-other-social-website-according-to-new-research/?sh=3211be1a6e1a (Accessed on 4 June