The Pan-African Media Forum (FOPAME 2026) opened on Wednesday 3 June in Bamako, drawing journalists, academics, and policymakers from across the continent to a gathering centered on Africa’s capacity to shape its own informational destiny. The event was inaugurated by Mali’s Prime Minister, General Abdoulaye Maïga, who framed the forum as a strategic milestone in the continent’s broader pursuit of sovereignty.
In his opening address, General Maïga situated the forum within Mali’s ongoing national refoundation under Transition President General Assimi Goïta — a project aimed at building a state that is sovereign across all its dimensions: political, institutional, economic, cultural, digital, and informational. Invoking Aimé Césaire’s warning that a civilization unable to resolve the problems created by its own functioning is a decadent one, the Prime Minister positioned media independence as inseparable from national resilience.
At the heart of the forum’s deliberations lies the proposition that information has become a strategic resource, shaped and contested by the twin forces of artificial intelligence and social media. The question animating proceedings — “Who speaks about Africa?” — encapsulates the continent’s determination to reclaim control over its own narrative, pushing back against external representations frequently at odds with African realities.
Security dimensions of media sovereignty featured prominently in discussions. General Maïga drew attention to the Sahel’s intensifying perception war, in which the media landscape has become as consequential as the physical battlefield. Journalism, he argued, is a strategic instrument of state sovereignty and societal resilience, combating rumor and reinforcing public trust. Media literacy and professional capacity-building were framed as collective security imperatives, with reference to Nelson Mandela’s maxim that education is the world’s most powerful transformative weapon.
The forum’s opening session concluded with a call for stronger pan-African cooperation in the media and digital domains, echoing Kwame Nkrumah’s injunction that Africa must unite. Speakers argued that twenty-first century pan-Africanism must extend beyond politics and economics to encompass media, information, and digital infrastructure — conditions they presented as essential to realizing the African Union’s Agenda 2063.