Audiences of our media can be excused if they have forgotten that there were momentous events across the continent this year. These include the uprisings in North Africa and the drama in Côte d’Ivoire, which ended in then president Laurent Gbagbo being captured in a bunker in the labyrinths of the presidential palace. He is now an awaiting prisoner at The Hague in Holland. Our media has dropped the ball yet again. The end of that saga led to the presumed winner of the elections, Allasane Outtarra, who had been holed up in the Golf Hotel and protected by a United Nations force, taking office as president. This was, in itself, a momentous and historic development on our continent, given the examples of Zimbabwe and Kenya where disputed elections were resolved by a unity government. In these cases, the presumed winners were rewarded with a post of prime minister and the presumed losers retained the office of president but with more powers than the prime minister. It did seem the continent leaders cared little about the voters’ choices and were more interested in power and resource sharing among the elite. Outtara’s case seemed to assert the notion that the voters’ wishes at the ballot box be respected. Of course the issue is much more complex given the elections had not been conducted in an atmosphere where all voters could decide under conditions of freedom. Nonetheless election monitors had declared the election an adequate representation of the choices of the people. Our media covered only some of this development. Only the drama. But as I have written in these pages before, after the drama, the story of Cote d’Ivoire disappeared despite the fact it had implications on the development of democratic processes and institutions in Africa. It is also not correct for me to say our media covered the story; they covered it via the Western media that purports to be the international media. There is no international media in the same sense that there is a global organisation called the UN. What goes for the international media is that which is owned by predominantly Western corporations or countries such as CNN, BBC, Radio France International. All of these have bureaus across the world and offer services dedicated to covering stories across the globe. They have some degree of influence with Western policymakers during crises, partly because they break the story and frame events in particular ways. It must be remembered that a number of extraordinary things happened in Cote d’Ivoire. A UN force, acting with rebel forces supporting a presidential candidate, and the French army overthrew a sitting president who had refused to relinquish power. The UN has never been known to be such an activist. In 1994 in Rwanda it actually left nearly a million people to die within 100 days. The African Union (AU) was ignored, as some commentators have noted, and been labelled as “Africanists” romantic about Africans leading solutions to problems on their continent. This pattern of military intervention, or invasion, repeated itself on a large scale in Libya where Nato bombed the dictatorial regime of the late Gaddafi until his regime collapsed and he was captured and slaughtered. Again, the AU was ignored and only the Arab League was listened to because its position was congruent with that of Nato. What was amazing, but revealing in the Libyan situation, was that the UN resolution – under which the intervention was legitimised – was to protect civilians from Gaddafi and his forces. But even after their defeat and with Gaddafi on the run, the bombing continued until he was found and killed. Our media, or the stories they imported, failed to separate the issues. Gaddafi brought the uprising of his people against him upon himself because of his tyrannical rule. The Libyan people needed to be supported to defeat him but did not need some people – who it turns out had extensive links to him and his son now in custody – to lead the uprising from the air. The Libyan revolution was hijacked and right now it does seem that it might degenerate into factions controlling different towns or regions. The Western media, masquerading as the international media, will soon label them as disparate if not desperate rebel forces that have degenerated into tribal warlords! You can’t win with these guys, they have a negative label for everything on our continent. Egypt and Tunisia have recently held elections which appear to be bringing into power political and religious movements – dubbed Islamists by the Western media. The label Islamists has connotations, of course, of political forces who are not the kind of democrats the Western media and leadership had in mind to replace the dictatorial regimes they supported, such as the likes of Mubarak, now on trial for corruption and other crimes. It is not an exaggeration that there is fear and trepidation in the West about how these new forces – not beholden to the West and long suppressed by Western-backed corrupt regimes in the name of strategic national security interests – might disturb the delicate balance of power in the oil-rich Middle East. In all these developments what we keep not getting is the African media’s independent take on the emerging situation in North Africa. Further we are also not getting their take on what the implications of the middle-of-the-night transfer of Gbagbo to the International Criminal Court at The Hague means. Many questions arise which the media should focus on. These include why the ICC agreed to have Saif al-Islam Gaddafi to be tried in a country which has yet to have a duly elected government and judicial system and that can be trusted to run a fair trial. But they were quick to take in Gbagbo. Another question is why the new government, and in particular President Outtarra, seems to have outsourced the trial of Gbagbo to the ICC instead of adopting a broader and comprehensive approach that would include the process of a truth and reconciliation commission which would not preclude trials. Outtarra has inadvertently also played into notions that we Africans cannot address impunity through our own institutions. Tawana Kupe is associate professor of media studies and dean of the faculty of humanities at Wits University.