Training: The final word

The third and final training day was spent doing assignments, there were two, participants could either write about the newly discovered natural gas in Mtwara, its implication problems and its future effects for the people living in the area.

The second topic addressed the issue of 'Press Freedom' or maybe its absence in Tanzania and how it has been affecting the media and journalists in the country. Here feature stories targeting international audience was required.

Gathering details and supporting stories from a number of websites wasn't easy but summing them all up to come up with 'readable' feature proved to be much harder, still once caught the hang of it, everything became a breeze.

There wasn't much to dislike about the training because it was fun band eye raiser but in future more days may be required in order to provide ample time for discussions as well as relieving the constraint of packing everything within limited space.

From Dar-es-salaam with glove: Battle for press freedom in Tanzania

It took US President Barrack Obama’s visit to Dar-es-salaam last July, for the outside world to get a glimpse of what is ailing the fourth estate in Tanzania, this insight was courtesy of the New York Times.

And while the local media was ‘busy’ singing the usual fan-fare praising the giant’s visit to the otherwise little known country, the international audience elsewhere got awed by some scary stuff that foreign media outlets were uncovering in the so-called ‘Haven of Peace,’ which is what the term ‘Dar-es-salaam’ means in Arabic.

Apparently journalists operating from where Obama hailed from, distanced themselves from ‘songs of praise,’ and were more interested in addressing real biting issues, including the highly threatened ‘press freedom’ in Tanzania.

The kidnapping and torturing of journalists, closure of some publications as well as threats frequently sent to media professionals was vividly touched in the New York Times analysis of Obama’s one-day tour of Tanzania’s capital city. It was until after the US front man left that the local media finally awoke from their stupor and realized that the party being over, the reality will soon bite … them.

For instance local papers came to learn that even as they were undertaking the cheerleader tasks during the US President’s visit, their reporters were being harassed by state organs, who pushed them around unceremoniously during various events.

Come October and the state, through its Tanzania Information Service (Maelezo) slammed a two-weeks’ ban to the popular Kiswahili daily ‘Mwananchi’ owned by the Nation Media Group, also sentencing a three-months hiatus to ‘Mtanzania,’ another daily run by Habari Corporation Limited both alleged to have at one time or another, printed seditious articles.

Mwananchi has completed its banning period but Habari Corporation fearing that they will be out of the media game by the time ‘Mtanzania’ resumes print next December, it pulled its weekly tabloid ‘Rai’ from shelves converting the publication into a daily, a move which initially attracted protest from Maelezo before the state organ eventually gave up.

The country which boasts the oldest newspaper in East Africa (the state-owned Daily News was established in 1932 then running as ‘Tanganyika Standard), Tanzania does not seem to have learned much from its nearly 80 years of being in the media industry.

But for the entire three decades of the country’s 52 years of independence, essentially more than half the period, Tanzania used to rely on the state-owned media outlets namely the Government Newspaper, Daily News, the ruling party controlled Kiswahili tabloid ‘Uhuru,’ and the public ‘Radio Tanzania.’

Ushering into Multi-party democracy in 1992 meant Tanzania was expected to allow private media outlets and having started with a number of on-and-off tabloids, the private publications took onto serious note circa 1994 when even the mainland’s first TV station went on air.

Private media apparently caught the country and its government unawares and when papers like ‘Mwanahalisi’ which got permanent ban early this year, started scooping things out, outspoken reporters, journalists and their respective outlets found themselves on the cross, bleeding with others, like the former Channel Ten’s TV reporter of Iringa, Daudi Mwangosi, bombed to shreds.

Since the state also used to control the once, ‘one-and-only’ journalism training outfit, the ‘Tanzania School of Journalism,’ whose outputs previously shaped to simply serve the government owned outlets, rationality or deep analysis reporting never got encouraged.

Old writers who happen to be products of yester-year’s media platform in Tanzania still form the basis of most newspapers, radio and television stations in the country and their ‘modus operandi’ includes operating in a sense of denial, discouraging creativity and clinging to political leaders or business people for favors.

Speaking of ‘business people’ these are usually the owners of a number of private media houses and many would rather use them as ‘ego nurturing’ set ups, business promoting ventures and occasionally using them to hit out at their opponents.

Fearing responsibilities, media owners have been using stringers to feed their outlets with news, most of the times these contributors earn peanuts but majority are paid nothing.

Still a number of paid and unpaid writers result to soliciting cash, car rides and other favors from sources, thus compromising the profession even further. The fact that the government has been pulling a number of journalists from their desks, giving them plum jobs like District and Regional leadership hasn’t been helping the profession either.

A number of senior journalists and even young upcoming ones have been jostling each other to get the attention of leaders, hoping to be remembered in future posts. These struggles for power has kicked the media industry in Tanzania back to the stone-age era of just 'surviving!' 

Linking second day stories to where they came from

Researching from the web and actually building up stories from the collected information formed many of the activities during the second day of Internet Investigation training.

The exercises were initially meant for practice by my own piece on 'Smart Kigali,' about turning cities into wireless hot spots clicked a good idea which I intend to develop into a full feature in few weeks.

The afternoon was back to refresh the tools on blogs, linking to sources and re-working the pages layouts ending with assignments for the next day, at least the day after tomorrow anyway, because it turns out that Wednesday is a holiday.

What I learned is that it is possible to come up with new and fresh sounding stories from materials gathered around previously written pieces the way bees gather nectar to make sweet testing honey. One thing to note though is that it shouldn't be a 'copy and paste' affair but each and every sentence should be written afresh.

So who is brighter? ‘Smart Kigali’ or ‘Loony Google’

By Marc Nkwame

While both Kenya and Tanzania are somehow ‘contemplating’ own ideas of ‘smart cities,’ Rwanda actually has one; the country is reportedly converting its capital city into one huge ‘hot spot,’ in which people could access the Worldwide Web via free wireless internet.

At least, the so-called 'Smart Kigali' project will apply in public places like Taxi parks, major hospitals, restaurants, hotels and commercial buildings in Kigali will be covered and authorities have gone a little bit more ambitious by including the service inside selected large buses so that people can surf while traveling.

For years the Kenyan capital of Nairobi topped the surfing bill as far as the highest number of internet users in East Africa are concerned, Tanzania’s Safari City of Arusha came second, but if the ‘Smart Kigali,’ plans sail as intended, Rwanda will overtake the two onto the top regional hotspot.

Coincidentally, Kenya had been planning a special ICT satellite city to be known as Konza in the outskirts of Nairobi, while Tanzania through the Nelson Mandela African Instituteof Science and Technology has a blueprint of ‘silicon valley’ type of city to be established in Karangai area of Tengeru, in Meru, one of the seven districts making up Arusha region.

Rwanda on the other hand intends to use telecom companies such as Tigo and Airtel to make the ‘Smart Kigali’ dream true; it is still not known how the majority of the country’s citizens will be able to benefit from free internet if required equipment such as computers, tablets and smartphone will remain out of reach for many.

There is also the case of Google ‘Loon project’ in which the California based tech giant intends to float balloons that will provide access to the areas previously ‘unconnected’ to the web with cloud internet services focused for developing nations precisely Africa.

Now if Google chooses to beam free internet to whole continent, chances are the giant serach-engine based tech firm offering will be more reliable than the usually fluctuating telcom ones that Rwanda intends to deploy. And who will need Airtel-Tigo GPRS-Edge when something stronger is in the air?

Google maybe over-blowing the balloon idea but should it float, maybe Rwanda's ‘Smart Kigali’ won’t be that smart after all  and once more Nairobi and Arusha will have the last laugh.

Google dominates first day of internet training

Google may be having the lion share of global online searches traffic but the search engine's dominance also proved to be overwhelming in the investigative internet training organized by the Media Institute of Southern Africa in conjunction with VIKES of Finland.

At least this proved to be the case on the inaugural day when the training opened up with a bit of challenge for some of us, who having hailed from upcountry, the direction to venue was somehow confusing, luckily there was Google Map which surprisingly proved to be more detailed in Dar-es-salaam than say, Arusha where I come from.

As Google or its map led me to the IFM building flawlessly, it also became apparent that the entire class will be stuck with it for the rest of the day as searching information from websites got to be the main topic.

During the day's session, Google towered high with its popular search engine though somehow we wondered why the trainer stuck to this dominant search engine ignoring other outputs like Yahoo or Microsoft's own, Bing.

With just eight 'students' the class was modest, but the computers provided were even more modest, refusing to display a number of websites including Gmail. 

Anyway after wrestling with them for a while we eventually managed to make Blogger.com work and got to register other blogs, specifically for training purposes, mine got the name of 'Mount Meru,' which is Tanzania's second highest peak forming the landmark background for Arusha City.

About Us

This site is managed by Marc Nkwame and created purposely for training thus all contents published here should not be used for public consumption.

Like others, we all work in the media industry and this entire week will be spent at the MISA-TAN training session in Dar-es-salaam where we expect to learn even more on how to make use of the internet, online social media outlets and forums in sourcing news and background information to build interesting and well-researched stories.

Mount Meru - Where the cloud rains down news

Welcome to the Mount Meru site.

Here you will learn a lot about online investigative journalism where the internent is to serve as tool for generating data as well as crowd sourcing information to build up well researched stories and news items.

This may also be your one stop center for reviews and annalysis on current affairs not to mention breaking news that cannot be found anywhere else on the net.

Marc