Global Voices Online

While the football world is enjoying the UEFA European Football Championship, many countries in Africa are restricted to watching 8 tournament games. Jentilisa, blogging from Madagascar, explains that the number of games to be broadcasted was decided by AFNEX (African Network and News Exchange) who bought the rights to the tournament in the region for African national televisions. He argues that Africa is home to many of the elite players who play in major European clubs and soon home of the next FIFA World Cup 2010 in South-Africa and the tournament should not be restricted to rich people who owns satellite dishes. He wishes that Chinese TV CCTV would dispute this monopoly in the future and lower the broadcasting fees for resource limited nations (fr and mg).

Jentilisa reports that the popular radio program “karajia” (discussion in Malagasy) braodcasted by the Roman Catholic Church Radio called Radio Don Bosco was suspended by the government. This suspension was also reported on a popular broadcast called ” kidoana maraina” on Radio Television Analamanga (RTA). Jentilisa explains that the reason for the suspension was to prevent a supposed-call for strike made on the radio broadcast by one of the listeners. Jentilisa is worried that this abuse of power may lead to internet censorship if this trend continues [Mg].

According to Jentilisa, the closing ceremony of the Indian Ocean Island Games went on without any troubles because the organizers learned from their previous mistakes during the opening ceremony (Mg).