The Booming of Media Freedom in Malawi

Suppression of the media is a tool a number of African leaders used in the post-independence era to consolidate their grip on power and to silence opposing views. Malawi's former president Banda, who led the country to independence from Britain in 1964, was one such leader. The suffocation of the media further created a culture where people suffered in silence as their freedom of expression was gravely stifled. This book examines the media in Malawi in the post-Banda era which came to an end following the wind of change that brought in multiparty democracy with the first elections held in 1994. It finds that the media still face a number of serious challenges despite a constitutional provision which guarantees media freedom. It, thus establishes that though formal media freedom is a necessary condition for a free media, it is in itself not sufficient. Moreover, in the long term, Malawi needs to achieve a higher level of economic activity enabling the media to operate in a market with sufficient consumers to generate the revenues able to make the media commercially viable. The country may then have attained sufficient conditions for the development of a free media.