By James Hall
JOHANNESBURG, Nov 10 2001 (IPS)

The study of economics may have been labelled the “dismal science”, but there was nothing dry and arcane about the deliberations of 70 beleaguered, bothered but undaunted business editors and correspondents who met this week in South Africa’s business capital, Johannesburg.

“We’re here to give ourselves moral support as well as information on how to report Africa’s business news,” said Ngoni Chanakira, Business Editor of the Daily News of Harare, whose chief editor Geoffrey Nyarota was arrested the last day of the conference by Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe’s government.

What is on the minds of business editors from the 30 African nations in attendance was how to increase business news coverage in the face of the limited resources of their own news organisations, and the negative stereotypes that colour world media reporting about Africa.

Doubling in delegate size since the first convocation last year, the African Economics Editors Forum attracted top South African government officials and corporate heads who sought to impress their views on the media opinion makers. Also in attendance were academics armed with the latest theories in economics reporting — favouring a populist understanding of business issues that affect people’s lives rather than reliance on jargon and technical data that often obfuscates business stories.

The forum’s conveyor, Nixon Kariithi, holds the Pearson Chair of Economics Journalism at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa.

“The forum’s final resolution stresses training for business reporters,” Kariithi said. “This is in line with the academics’ educational approach, but it also reflects the business editors’ need for skilled reporters who can convey complex economics issues.”

The politicians speaking at catered feasts sponsored by such powerful corporations as diamonds giant De Beers, the timber products company SAPPI, and financial and mobile telephone leaders Standard Bank and MTN, stuck with their standard boilerplate speeches which their listeners had heard at other venues.

But the presence of the politicians was an endorsement of business reporting, and recognition of the importance of this underrated speciality.

South Africa’s finance minister, Trevor Manuel, illustrated how an African nation’s business fortunes are tied to the economic well being of its neighbouring nations in the region.

Tito Mboweni, the governor of the South African Reserve Bank, instructed on the need for absolute independence from political interference for a country’s central bank, which sets monetary policy about interest rates and the printing of currency.

“In South Africa under apartheid, just before elections the president would order the reserve bank to cut interest rates, so there was cheaper money, and after the elections the rates would go back up,” Mboweni said.

“When I accepted the job as reserve bank governor, I asked President (Thabo) Mbeki to promise never to call me about interest rates, and he has kept that promise,” he related, to the laughter of economics editors from countries whose own presidents have shown no such restraint.

Alec Erwin, South Africa’s trade minister, also invoked laughter by saying involvement in economic policy is a chief cause of baldness.

He urged correspondents from developed world news services to distinguish between individual African nations, and not lump the continent’s uniquely different countries together in a troubled, crisis-ridden whole.

A native of Cameroon who represented the World Bank, Eric Chinje, challenged the business editors to monitor the spending habits of officials in their country working with World Bank funds. “Your readers must know when an official is using funds intended for a development project to stay at a five-star hotel,” Chinje said.

The business editors from the continent’s economic powerhouses — Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa –down to minor players like Seychelles and Swaziland, already have a full plate of news stories to feed their readers, but are faced with budgetary and technical shortcomings that often make their task difficult.

“The forum can connect donor agencies with editors who want to find funds to train their staff,” said conveyor Kariithi. “The delegates really need trained reporters.”

Business and economics reporting requires more than routine journalistic skills. The reporter has to know about the different business sectors — agriculture and industry, mining and tourism, transportation and telecommunications — with sufficient expertise to explain stories and spot trends.

The reporter has to know enough about business to ask insightful questions of business leaders, and not be intimidated by a Chief Executive Officer’s (CEO’s) power when business decisions may harm the environment or the welfare of a workforce or community.

“Too many business stories are just reprints of public relations releases sent by companies,” noted Adewale Adenye, Assistant News Editor for ‘The Punch’ newspaper in Lagos, Nigeria.

Other business editors agreed that it is simpler for reporters to pass on a public relations release as news than investigate the implications or value of a corporate development.

Nigeria’s Business Times editor, Dotun Adekanmbi, noted that some business reporters enter the corporate world themselves, but fail to rise above the management level, a fact that other editors could use as a cautionary tale to advise their own reporters who seek greener pastures in the companies they report about.

“This type of useful information exchange is what this forum is all about,” said a delegate from South Africa. “No one knows better how difficult business sector reporting can be than a business editor, and for the first time we are together from all over the continent.”

Joining the Africans were two editors from India — Monika Halan from Outlook India, and Gautam Chikeermane from the Intelligent Investor — whose presentations on their own innovative approach to business reporting in the Asian subcontinent showed a common experience to this type of reporting throughout the developing world.

But with the focus primarily on Africa, the view that connected the business editors was the need to expand economics news coverage to better promote the continent’s opportunities, and to counter prevailing negative reporting about Africa.

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