A crusading publisher pushes Niger's limits
Maman Abou's anti-corruption scoops are profitable, but dangerous to report.
By Jennifer Margulis | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitorfrom the April 17, 2007 edition
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Niamey, Niger - "I have geese!" Maman Abou tells me when I ask if he sleeps with a gun under his pillow or takes any other security measures.
"Geese?" I ask Mr. Abou, one of the most successful and influential businessmen in this, one of the world's poorest countries.
"Geese!" he insists.
It's only upon approaching his modest three-bedroom home here in Niger's capital city that I see what he means: Three plump geese honk deafeningly from a pen in his yard. They make a great alarm, if poor security personnel.
Abou – who owns Niger's biggest publishing house – has ample reason to be concerned about his safety. He's a free-speech crusader in a young African democracy where freedom of the press is not a guaranteed right.
Death threats are not uncommon for him, and visits to jail frequent. Government thugs once shaved his head after he questioned election results. And his press – which prints a dozen opposition publications in addition to his anticorruption-crusading Le Républicain newspaper – was set afire in 1998. Abou's latest jailing was last year when he was held for four months on charges that he defamed the government and spread false information by suggesting that Niger had turned away from the West and toward Iran. But it's generally believed that his arrest – along with Le Républicain's editor in chief – was because of an exposé of the theft of $8 million in European aid for education. Reporters uncovered details of how the minister of basic education and literacy stole the money by using counterfeit receipts for school supplies "purchased" but not delivered. The minister admitted he'd done it on orders from superiors, and he's now serving prison time for the crime.
"Many Nigerien leaders feel perfectly justified when they throw a journalist or human rights activist in jail for criticizing them or their regime," explains Thomas Kelley, an associate professor of law at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and recent Fulbright fellow in Niger. In an e-mail interview he questioned whether true freedom of the press is possible in a country where 85 percent of the population cannot read, and many government leaders are illiterate. "The government's not accustomed to stinging criticism and will continue to lash out when it can, limited only ... by fear of international condemnation."
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