Mali’s Sunshine Journalism

In Mali, a country currently ruled by a cohort of pro-Russian army officers, the only way a journalist can stay alive or avoid a prison sentence is by practising ‘sunshine journalism’: praising the military junta’s efforts to ‘eradicate’ terrorist groups and retake former Tuareg rebel strongholds, unify and ‘develop’ Mali, regain national sovereignty, push aside neocolonialism and vilify the West, especially the former colonial power, France. Praising the Russia-Mali partnership, as well as the newly formed Alliance of Sahel States (AES) and its other members, Niger and Burkina Faso, is also de rigueur.

Questioning the war or the military government’s foreign policy, calling for a return to constitutional rule, reporting on human rights abuses by the army and Wagner mercenaries, or on antiterrorist operations which end up killing civilians, must be avoided at all costs.

Even criticising Mali’s neighbouring juntas can land you in trouble, as Joliba TV, a popular privately owned station, found out recently. Issa Kaou N’Djim, an independent political commentator, was detained on 13 November, after alleging during a Joliba programme that a recent coup attempt in Burkina Faso was an invention of the junta. N’Djim will be prosecuted for insulting a foreign head of state. Joliba’s broadcasting licence was revoked and the station shut down. In mid-December, the media regulator commuted the shutdown to a six-month suspension.In November 2022, Joliba was suspended for two months for criticising Mali’s transitional government on its Facebook page.

‘We have been unwillingly turned into mouthpieces for the juntas and Russian propaganda machines,’ one journalist told me as he prepared to flee the country. ‘Working as a journalist in Mali has become a matter of life and death. If the military do not put you behind bars on trumped-up charges, the jihadist groups will track you down, kidnap or even kill you if they find out that your reporting is harming their interests.’

In 2021, the Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA) raised the alarm in État de la liberté de la presse au Mali, a report that stressed the vulnerability of journalists after the second coup d’état earlier in the year.

Angela Quintal, the Africa programme co-ordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), told me it isn’t only foreign media outlets – mainly French – whose staff have been ‘definitively’ forbidden to work in Mali or faced suspensions.‘Local outlets have also been barred from distributing content made by RFI and France 24,’ she said, ‘and Mali’s media regulator in April “invited all media” to “stop all broadcasting and publication” of coverage on political parties and activities of a political nature of associations.’ According to Quintal, the uptick in regulatory restrictions coincided with the arrest of Abdoul Niang in October 2023 for allegedly making false statements in an interview on the Facebook page of a local media outlet in connection with the dismissal of a separate defamation case against him. ‘Though Niang is no longer in detention, the message that journalism can be considered a crime in Mali has been received loud and clear.’

And not for the first time: in 2016, Birama Touré, a reporter for the Bamako-based investigative weekly Le Sphinx, disappeared without trace. In 2022, after a long investigation, Reporters without Borders concluded that he had died in a detention centre at the hands of Malian state security.

After Touré’s disappearance, his friend and colleague Ousmane (not his real name) stopped working as a journalist himself to become instead a fixer for foreign reporters. He would advise his clients not to carry a smartphone or press card, or anything that could identify them as a journalist to the security services: they should meet their contacts, get their story and get out of the country as soon as possible. But now that so many foreign media have been banned from Mali, Ousmane’s work has dried up.

One of the only ways for foreign correspondents to get into Mali now is to rely on the services of human smugglers, as I did a few weeks ago. Ousmane told me there were ‘no foreign tourists and journalists, no income for us and, with no development aid from France, most social development projects have come to a standstill’.

I met an activist who blames the region’s political instability on the West, which for years supported corrupt, nepotistic dictators so long as they promoted Western interests and maintained a façade of democracy. ‘Look at where we are now,’ she said. ‘The West’s strategy has badly backfired and generated anti-Western sentiments which the juntas have capitalised on.’

According to Poorva Karkare, a policy officer at the European Centre for Development Policy Management, there was ‘genuine discontent’ with the way that democracy and the right to self-determination, ‘whether politically or in terms of security’, were subordinated to France’s ‘self-serving policies’ while local leaders focused on ‘rent-seeking and illicit trade’. Russia has been able to ‘harness this disenchantment’, but too much emphasis on ‘Russian flag-waving’ downplays the ‘failure of the French, and the West more broadly, to take the people’s grievances seriously’.

Supported by a grant from the Institute for War and Peace Reporting.