https://zimbabwe.misa.org Impact of Covid 19 on Media Sustainability on the business, particularly of legacy media such as The Namibian. In circumstances where UN agencies and donors are involved with projects to, for example promote the Sustainable Development Goals, electoral campaigns and civic education, state media is foregrounded. state, an emerging democracy marked by rentseeking and corruption, in a wider context of inequality and exclusion enabled by elite-driven privatization processes and global capital.11 In some African countries, fears about repressive media legislation may trump economic, financial and business concerns. Tanzania is one, having fallen 25 places to 11th to 118 RSF’s World Press Freedom Index for 20198 and dropped a further six points to 124 out of 180 countries in the 2020 index. The RSF sees the precipitous fall as unprecedented in recent years.9 Not content with cracking down on traditional mass media, in July 2020, Tanzania issued new Electronic and Postal Communications (Online Content) Regulations, which have been condemned as repressing “online speech, privacy and access to information.” Regulations were also passed imposing censorship on international news.10 That said, a weak governance framework enabling capture is also a wider problem. The multiple constraints facing the media in Tanzania limit its vitality, although critical and analytical reporting does take place. Government control is entwined with business interests in an attempt to retain political power. The overall environment produces a forum of media capture dominated by the centralized The 2019 African Media Barometer on Tanzania commented that Tanzania’s media diversity was in spite of “an arsenal of legal regulatory tools … used to stifle the emergence of economically sustainable and independent media. Licence fees for all media, for example, are high and prohibitive. Media inputs are not tax-exempt and even community radios have to pay high licence fees annually.”12 Evidence of media oppression, unrelated to the Covid-19 crisis, is that in June 2020, government revoked the licence of Tanzania Daima, described as a “proopposition daily newspaper,” ahead of elections effectively closing the newspaper down with the loss of at least 100 jobs.13 It must be noted that Tanzania alone of the countries discussed in this report is expected to have economic growth this year, of 1.9%, as measured by real gross domestic product, so it seems to have escaped the impact of the Covid-19 crisis rather lightly, which will have fewer consequences for its media in pure financial terms. However, the lack of economic pressure may give the aid-dependent Tanzanian government room to avoid political and media reform. 8. PMA, “Media Freedom Crisis in Tanzania,” Public Media Alliance (blog), December 10, 2019, https://www.publicmediaalliance.org/ media-freedom-crisis-in-tanzania/. 9. RSF, “Tanzania : ‘Bulldozing’ the Media | Reporters without Borders,” RSF, 2020, https://rsf.org/en/tanzania. 10. RSF, “Tanzania: RSF Condemns Latest Government Clampdown on the Media | RSF,” Reporters without Borders, August 20, 2020, https://rsf.org/en/news/tanzania-rsf-condemns-latest-government-clampdown- media.. 11. Ryan Powell, “Unfinished Business: Tanzania’s Media Capture Challenge,” in In the Service of Power: Media Capture and the Threat to Democracy (Washington, D.C, 2107), 93 12. Fesmedia Africa, “African Media Barometer: A Home-Grown Analysis of the Media Landscape in Africa : Tanzania 2019” (FriedrichEbert-Stiftung, 2020), http://library.fes.de/pdf-files/bueros/africa-media/16280.pdf. 13. Simon Mkina, “Tanzania - Opposition Leaders Locked up, Newspaper Shut Down,” The Continent, June 27, 2020. 7