Commissioners at IMC reading out the revocation notice today in Freetown and (inset), Sierra Leone’s Independent Media Commission logo

  Abubakar Hashim

Sierra Leone’s Independent Media Commission (IMC) is on a sanitising mission of the media landscape in the country.

Once known as the Athens of West Africa, journalism originated in Sierra Leone because of Fourah Bay College which produced the first crop of Africa’s intelligentsia.

But after years of independence from Britain in 1961, the country’s media industry plunged into oblivion.

Mushroom media houses, with poor production and remuneration, persisted for years after independence.

The new IMC’s stance to revoke licenses of 104 newspapers, 11 magazines, 30 radio stations and 3 satellite TV services for noncompliance with the registration or re-registration process is, indeed, a welcome development.

It is a strategic move to sanitise and regain lost glory.

It will beef the production outfit of the media industry to where it was as the “Athens of West Africa”