Search:

Salim Amin's A24 TV channel must succeed because there is no other choice

By: Jerry Okungu

[ Posted On: 2006-08-13 ]

Africa needs people of dreams, vision and passion. Salim Amin of Camerapix is one such person. And being the son of legendary Mohammed Amin, it does not come as a surprise that young Salim has dared to take his father's fame and dream a notch higher.

Let me start by saying that the sheer courage, determination and initial personal investment in putting together project A24 deserves accolades from all of us who have some understanding of how the media industry works in this continent. It is not a road the faint-hearted would dare venture on. It is a road infested with all manner of marauding beasts ready to pounce on the sojourner and bleed him to death. And Africa's media history is full of such examples.

At the just concluded Media Conference at which Salim Amin unveiled his A24 plan, one Dr. Fackson Banda of Rhodes University Media Institute gave a detailed account of the many attempts in Africa to create an African channel that would effectively compete with Western Media that was seen to depict Africa negatively at the slightest opportunity.

If the founding fathers of this continent thought it wise and opportune to establish Pan African News Agency- Pana, it was because they were uneasy with the way many international wire agencies covered the continent. Today, for the same reasons Pana was established three decades ago, younger African media professionals are still raising the same concerns about Western Media, prompting them to pontificate about how to fend off Western Media domination of Africa.

About the same time that Pana was born, another cousin in the form of URTNA was also created by the same heads of state mainly composed of State Broadcasters that were naturally controlled by the states. URTNA was supposed to be a perfect example of how Africans could exchange local programming from different stations and regions across the continent. It was a perfect example of how the continent could feed into one another in the area of news, features, culture and entertainment

Today, many decades later, the two outfits are a pale shadow of their former selves. In fact, as I write this article, the URTNA Exchange Programme Center which was based at Kenyatta International Conference should have closed its doors by now. The governments that initiated them finally failed to support them financially because governments themselves are broke.

In the mid 1990s, two interesting media phenomena took Africa by storm. Just as Mandela was walking into freedom, Noah Samara, an American of Ethiopian origin had a wonderful idea; he wanted to create a worldwide audio communication system that was bound to revolutionize information dissemination to the rest of the underprivileged world. He targeted the Third World in South East Asia, Middle East, Latin America and Africa.

Noah's project looked solid with the most elaborate project plan to go with. He thought about almost everything under the sun that would make it work. He thought about human resource, finances, technology and strategy to take his vision places. He even zoned his sphere of operations into Africa and the Middle East, Asia, Latin America and Western Europe.

By October 1998, Noah Samara's WorldSpace project launched its first satellite into orbit, the Afrispace satellite to serve the African continent, parts of Europe and the Middle East. The other satellites for Asia and Latin America would follow shortly once the African segment was up and running.

Everything looked so real and possible at the time. The Washington, DC head office was up and running with over two hundred highly paid staff, mainly Americans, running the operation. London Office, Nairobi, Johannesburg, Munchen and Dakar were soon operational. Later an office in the Indian Sub-Continent and a host of other offices in Latin America, China and Japan were opened and running.

As Noah Samara glob-trotted the world meeting heads of state and big business executives, it looked like finally, a really African dream would finally take the world by storm.

What baffled critics and proponents alike was Samara's ability to raise close to U$ 5 billion to build satellites, order millions of satellite receivers from Japanese manufacturers and run a global operation whose logistics was simply mind boggling.

As a person who worked in Noah's Africa division, I understood the logic of his vision. He had realized the marginalization of Africa and the rest of the Third World during the era of the New Information and Communication Order. The Third World was never a priority of the First World, the dominant force at the Geneva ITU conventions. And Noah Samara, as a specialized lawyer in space matters and a regular delegate at ITU conventions, understood precisely why the underprivileged world stood no chance of benefiting from the pronouncements of the New Information and Communication Order. He knew this because the First World dominated space and communication technologies along with resources and human skills that went with them. The only way he saw out was to join them, use their technology and launch a specialized service for the Third World if he could raise the required cash.

As a shrewd businessman, Noah Samara opted for a hybrid of a charitable service supported by commercial enterprises. He saw that the only contribution an ordinary Chinese living in Mongolia and an African eking out a living in Timbuktu would be to own a U$100 audio satellite receiver and that individual would be connected to multiple information channels flowing in freely via satellites.

And how would Samara recoup the billions of cash that he had borrowed from investors to put up the whole thing? He had figured all that out in his masterpiece of a business plan. He would invite broadcasters worldwide to rent capacity on his three satellites at the modest price U$1 million a year per broadcaster to be on board and reach a worldwide audience. African broadcasters alone would give him U$300 million a year in capacity renting alone before he roped in huge advertising share revenue the broadcasters would be raking in from enthusiastic advertisers. If things went according to plan, African audiences would grow in leaps and bounds with a captive audience of 10 million listeners in the first year of operation using one million audio receivers.

What Noah Samara did not envisage was that planning a market entry strategy for an African venture on the internet in the corridors of Washington was a sure recipe for disaster. He also had grossly overrated the purchasing power of the marginalized peasant in Mongolia and Timbuktu. These peasants would not afford a U$100 to purchase what in their opinion was just a glorified radio whose competitors were selling for U$10 a piece or less on the streets and slums of the Third World cities. To make it worse, he had overlooked the final selling price of the receiver by the time it reached the consumer in the Third World. It would no longer be $100 but $300!

The price of the receiver became the instant death knell of Samara's dream. Sooner, rather than later, news started trickling in that Japanese manufacturers were reluctant to go into production without guaranteed numbers since their own independent field research had indicated that their receiver would be too expensive for poor Africa.

To save his face since he still believed in the project, Noah Samara is rumoured to have paid the Japanese cash advance for 100,000 sets to test the market as soon as the Afrispace satellite was launched. Interestingly his first massive retrenchment exercise in Washington took place just one month after the African satellite went up in December 1998. It was the first clear sign that all was not well at the WorldSpace Corporation.

Despite these setbacks, Noah Samara still soldiered on, opened a luxurious London office, commissioned the Nairobi and Johannesburg outfits with the Accra office following in quick succession.

With all the brilliance that Samara exhibited in the initial stages of the project, observers started noticing a certain amount of extravagance and showmanship that would finally ruin his business. He loved meeting heads of state in Africa, throwing big parties, sponsoring huge ITU conferences particularly in South Africa where his craving for Mandela's attention was simply repulsive. He would donate hundreds of thousands of dollars for this and that Mandela fund; cash which was not from the proceeds of profits but borrowed money!

Today, WorldSpace is something else in Africa. With most of its offices in the region and London closed; one is left wondering to what use the WorldSpace satellites that were meant to serve the underprivileged Third World they are today.

As Noah Samara was launching his WorldSpace in Africa, another group of ambitious Black Americans, probably also attracted by the Mandela magic, also set up shop in Johannesburg to beam TV Africa to the rest of the continent and beyond. To them this was the channel for Africa by Africans; and for awhile it looked like it would push Multi-choice pay channel, also from Johannesburg out of the African market.

Its selling point was that it was a movie channel that was free-to-air and that needed no satellite dish and no decoder! More importantly it was an all Black outfit as opposed to Multi-choice that was the preserve of South African whites. A few years later, TV Africa, like WorldSpace is no more!

The question to ask is this: why have all these great dreams failed in our continent since we got our independence from European masters more that 40 years ago?

The answer partly lies in a paper presented at the Nairobi Media conference early this week. In his paper entitled: Creating International Support for the Development of the Newsmedia, Professor Fackson Banda of Rhodes University in South Africa says that, "Any talk of developing African media institutions is tied up in ideology- a set of strongly held beliefs about what the nature and role of the media should be."

Professor Banda goes on to say that, "We might want to go further back in time and ask why it was that Great Britain developed state-supported broadcasting infrastructures in its colonies. The answer lies somewhere in the documents prepared by the British Colonial Office. In 1949, the desire to take speedy counter measures against the spread of Communism was reason enough for Great Britain to earmark funds for the development of broadcasting services. Communism was seen as a catalyst for the rising tide of African nationalism."

If what Professor Banda says above is put in to context, then one can easily understand the desire of the Americans, the British and the Arabs to strengthen their VOA, CNN, BB World Service and Al Jazeera networks to the rest of the world.

As much as the Americans and the British feel obliged to influence world opinion through their own media, the Arabs, united under Islam and threatened by the invasion of Western culture, military power and the imposition of Western brand of democracy on their soil; they have reason enough to establish on an ideological basis, their equivalent of BBC World and CNN because as Muslims and Arabs, they are at war with the Western Alliance.

It is this commitment to a cause that finances a regional network. Without a cause, a belief or an ideological commitment by people in power and in control of resources, a Pan African media network may never survive on individual enterprise and good business plans.

As Britain, the USA and the Arab world are large and homogeneous economies, ours is a fragmented continent with multiple competing spheres of influence, not to mention thousands of dialects coupled with multiple incongruent diversities that are difficult to reconcile.

And with fairly liberated airwaves across the continent, rallying behind one broadcaster without a cause is a sure litmus test for Salim Amin.

Yet Amin and Camerapix must succeed in this one for if they don't, the whole continent will have confirmed one more time; that we are more of dreamers than doers.

Article Source: http://www.afroarticles.com/article-dashboard

Jerry Okungu is a freelance political analyst based in Nairobi, Kenya. Jerry also serves as a Board Director at The Kenya Broadcasting Corporation. Jerry has written extensively on issues affecting Kenya and the rest of Africa over the years. Other articles written by Jerry Okungu are available at this location

| View Profile & All Articles By: Jerry Okungu |

		Post Comment
		Blog This Article!
		Discuss Article in Forum(s)
		Publication \| Reprint Terms

Please Rate this Article

Not yet Rated

Click the XML Icon Above to Receive African Insights Articles Via RSS!

| Category Feeds | All-in-one Feed | Other Feed & Syndication Options |

Additional Articles From - Home | Afro Issues | African Insights

	Print This Article
	Post Comment
	Add To Favorites
	Email To Friends
	Ezine Ready \| Syndication
	Make PDF Article
	Share in FaceBook
	Post To del.icio.us
	Post To Furl
	Add To Google Bookmarks
	Submit To Propellor
	Add To Yahoo! My Web
	Add Main Feed To Outlook
	Post to BookMarks @ AfroArticles.com

	Post To BookMarkAfrica.com

| More Subscription Options |

Site Home

Article Categories

More Search Options

Site Map

Submit Articles

Top Authors

Most Recent Articles