Mozambique
were following orders of someone to
murder him, but they did not reveal
the name.
• On 8 December, a group of eight
armed men, all unknown, allegedly from the Mozambique Defence
Force, threatened to kill the journalist and coordinator of the community radio station in Catandica,
Manica province. The same group,
driving a Mahindra vehicle, robbed
and tortured two of the journalist’s
children and vandalised property.
They asked the journalist’s children
about his whereabouts. At the time,
the journalist was not at home. John
Chekwa and Rádio Catandica are
accused of being responsible for the
poor electoral results of the Frelimo
party in Catandica, because they
invited people quite critical of Frelimo’s governance as guests on their
radio programmes.

DIGITAL MIGRATION AT A SNAIL’S
PACE
The digital migration process in Mozambique, started on 7 November 2010,
with the adoption by the Council of
Ministers of the DVB-T2 technological
standard and later with the creation of
the National Digital Migration Commission (COMID) to prepare the National
Digital Migration from Analog to Digital Broadcasting, has moved along at a
slow pace. Deadlines have been missed
by a wide margin. The end of analogue
broadcasting was set for June 17, 2015.
Almost two years later, Mozambique
has yet to demonstrate any decisive development in the migration process.
The migration commission, COMID,
has since been extinguished and the
process passed over to a new public
company, the Transport, Multiplexing
and Transmission (TMT). The new entity
is made up of the public companies TV

de Moçambique (TVM), Rádio Moçambique (RM) and Telecomunicações de
Moçambique (TDM) and without any
private operator. This raises concern,
given the risk that the public entities,
owners of TMT and heavily controlled
by the political power, are at the same
time competing with the private ones
and may in the future resort to acts of
blackmail, even more so in the context
of the party-centric State and control of
the content of some of the government
media.

Armed conflict and the
economic crisis were
the biggest threats to
press freedom.
Community radios, which are quite influential in the districts where they are
in place, fear that they might be adversely affected, since they are not yet
ready for migration. In Mozambique,
revenues from many community radios
do not even cover running costs. A recent study (FORCOM, 2016) indicates
that community radio stations played a
key role in the 2014 elections, which
was a cause for concern for government
officials.
In 2015, the Government cancelled
the tender that had been awarded to
StarTimes Software Technology Co.
for breaches of the agreements and
launched a new public tender that was
won by the same company. The results
were made public in October 2016. At
present a number of processes are unfolding to find financing for the project,

So This is Democracy? 2016

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