By Enock Sithole
Journalism education in the Ivory Coast is “very theoretical and not up to date”, still following the theoretical approaches of the 1970s and 1980s, so says Prof Aghi Bahi, who teaches anthropology of communication in the Department of Communication Sciences at the Centre for Studies and Research in Communication at Félix Houphouët-Boigny University in Abidjan.
He said there were only a few lecturers with journalism training or professional experience. Because of the requirement that university lecturers should have a doctorate, it was rare to find people with journalism experience teaching in journalism schools.
Journalism teaching, he added, did not take into account recent developments. It was less accommodating to young learners. It excludes tuition in media law, media economics, ethics and professional conduct, “teachings that can enrich (student journalists)”. Student internships were rather rare and often occurred once a university degree in the humanities or social sciences had been obtained, he said.
The country’s regulations allow people without a journalism qualification to practice journalism provided they have a degree in any humanities or social sciences subject and underwent one or two years of internship in a newsroom. “The teachings, therefore, remain very theoretical and often disconnected from the main issues of professional journalism. In fact, journalists trained in these establishments accumulate gaps, e.g. confusion between investigation and reporting,” said Prof Bahi.
Editorial managers often complain about the workplace preparedness of the graduates they recruit. This is because graduates in journalism or other fields entering the profession, needed to be “literally re-trained and ‘reformatted’ by the structures that recruit them”.
“Apart from the ISTC (Institut Supérieur des Sciences et Techniques de la Communication) and ESMA (École de Spécialités Multimédia d’Abidjan), which are equipped with studios for practical teaching, the teaching provided by other establishments is mainly theoretical,” said Prof Bahi, adding that young graduates from most journalism training programmes were not prepared for the operational aspects of the profession.
“Their basic knowledge of journalism is systematically taken up during internships and the first years of practicing journalism. In other words, the editorial office or media institution that hosts the young graduate takes up the training as best it can, and perfects this training,” said Prof Bahi.
Nonetheless, newsrooms hire journalism graduates, albeit at a low rate.
Journalism graduates who do not get absorbed by newsrooms, find employment in corporate communication, public administration communication and consultancy for political entrepreneurs, etc. These sectors are attractive to journalism graduates because they tend to pay better salaries.
Despite unattractive pay in journalism and other negative discourses, journalism education remains very attractive to young people in the country. “There is a demand (for enrolment in journalism education) that seems surprisingly high to me,” he said.
There is no journalism training in indigenous languages and the one broadcasting service that offers programming in indigenous languages, the Radiodiffusion Television Ivoirienne (RTI), uses staff who do not “have the status of journalists”.
The country boasts a handful of journalism schools, although all of them are based in the capital Abidjan and only two are public-owned. These are the Université Felix Houphouët-Boigny and the Institut Supérieur des Sciences et Techniques de la Communication. The privately-owned universities that offer journalism education are the École Française des Attachés de Presse, École de Spécialités Multimédia d’Abidjan, L’Institut Universitaire d’Abidjan, the Université de l’Atlantique and the Université Catholique d’Afrique de l’Ouest.
Prof Bahi, who is also an avid researcher, lamented the fact that the country had “not yet managed to develop journalism research and teaching that promotes the emergence of new journalism free from political militancy and the imitation of French forms”.