The infection and fatality rates in many African countries have been unpredictably fluctuating since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. The COVID-19 vaccination rate in Africa is also notably lower than on other continents. As part of Africa, Nigeria has also experienced several spikes in COVID-19 infection cases and fatalities. Focusing on Nigeria’s urgent need to ramp up the COVID-19 vaccination rate, this study investigated Nigerians’ perceived protective measures, which indicates their risk perception of the COVID-19 pandemic. This study employed the protection motivation theory (PMT) as its theoretical framework. The PMT explains how individuals are motivated to protect themselves and engage in protective measures when they encounter a health risk. Specifically, this study focused on the difference between healthcare professionals and the general public, comparing their risk perception of the COVID-19 pandemic and its protective measures. Analysing data from 630 voluntary participants, this study provides recommendations and meaningful implications for Nigeria's current and future pandemic health communication campaigns and interventions.

During the COVID-19 outbreak, diverse groups and organisations in South Africa played an important communicative role which, alongside the government, collectively mitigated the spread of the disease. A previous study that we undertook to assess government communication revealed that there were organisations, groups, and actors that addressed gaps in official messaging. In this article, we explore the ways in which these actors recognised gaps in government communication and stepped in both to draw attention to these gaps and to devise timely solutions. Seven representatives of four groupings were interviewed. The groups and actors were identified because the researchers became aware of their non-governmental communications efforts. Their insights were transcribed and thematically analysed. The findings showed that although the government, through its agencies and presidential addresses to the nation, made concerted efforts to provide relevant information to the entire population, these actors were quick to identify the communications lacunae and stepped in where there was lack of reach. They identified inadequacies such as: non-optimal use of communication channels, neglected languages, a lack of scientifically based information, and a lack of context-driven information. The findings highlight the complexity of the challenge of talking to a nation when the country’s communications landscape is complex, multilingual, and multifaceted.1

Although Botswana is commonly heralded as a democratic country, its national television service—Botswana Television (BTV)—has for close to two decades grappled with trying to perform the roles of nurturing democracy and gratifying the despotic instructions of the government. With the limited privately owned media in Botswana, expectations are that BTV offers itself as a platform for civic participation, serves as a conduit between the state and the public, broadcasts content that informs and educates society, and reports impartially on issues that concern members of the public such as politics, questionable government activities, unemployment, and socio-economic inequalities. Instead, BTV has its programming skewed towards the ruling elites. BTV's performance in this regard results from its funding and control by the government. This article argues that for a national media service to nurture democratic ideals in society, the state should introduce policy reforms that serve the interests of all stakeholders and allow media practitioners to exercise professionalism without any unnecessary pressures from the government.

With the advent of social media, traditional analogue radio has converged to audio-visual with print formats. Using the case of community radio in Zimbabwe, this article explores how radio broadcasters have taken advantage of media convergence to disseminate text as implant on radio. A qualitative content analysis of community radio platforms on Facebook reveals that some multilingual community radio stations still maintain their local languages in written text as captions or print, although there is a tendency towards English and major indigenous language dominance. Using language revitalisation theory, we argue that merging written text with radio on social media should always maintain the distinctness of radio and text as implant that reflect the local languages of community radio stations to revitalise or strengthen indigenous languages. We find the affordances of digital connection through Facebook useful to revitalise languages which are no longer used in the everyday communication of a digital audience.

Millions of South Africans watch soap operas every day, not only for entertainment but also to learn about current trends and developments. These soap operas tell a story of real people in real-life situations in relatable spaces such as homes, corporate spaces, and many other types of organisations. The portrayals of occupations on television, particularly in soap operas, can have an impact on how viewers perceive occupations. This article provides an insight into how one South African soap opera, Muvhango, positions men and women concerning roles and occupations in it narrative. These associations and portrayals determine whether or not Muvhango attempts to smash the glass ceiling. The study used content and textual analysis to determine themes that recur on the soap opera with regard to women’s roles and occupations. The findings suggest that soap operas are, to a certain extent, able to smash the cultural and occupational class ceiling; however, there is still a long way to go. The study suggests revisiting the power of media in formulating policies on gender equality, and advocating for media to adopt a more socially responsible role while exercising their freedom of expression through artistic and cultural products like soap operas.

The current online environment has seen an explosion of false news and conspiracy theories, and questions have been raised as to whether Large Language Models or Large Generative Artificial Intelligence Models such as ChatGPT could be used to generate false information. Against this background, the current study investigated whether ChatGPT could be used as a reliable source of information about Russian military involvement in Ukraine (2014– present). Based on previous research, seven Russian narratives that have justified Russian military involvement in Ukraine (from a Russian perspective) were identified and ChatGPT was tasked with generating 10 responses to 10 questions posed around these narratives. Responses were scored for truthfulness by two annotators. Overall, the study found that ChatGPT does not generate misinformation, and on average, truthfulness was scored at 3.19/4. It is also shown how ChatGPT's responses differed between questions, with those relating to Russian claims about Ukrainian atrocities in the Donbas and the reliability of Russian media channels scoring lower on truthfulness, and those relating to the reliability of the Western mainstream media scoring the highest. Generally, ChatGPT's responses pointed to reliable and trustworthy sources of information about this conflict, suggesting that this and similar technologies could be employed to combat misinformation.

Like many sectors, the South African fast-food market was adversely affected by the country's first COVID-19 “lockdown,” with franchises forced to close or only partially operate between March and June of 2020. Fast-food establishments are significant contributors to South Africa's food and beverages sector, and their closure during the stringent lockdown periods had a critical economic impact. Furthermore, during the hard lockdown, misinformation about fast-food operations increased, with public relations (PR) practitioners often needing social media to engage with consumers more effectively. This study explores how PR practitioners in a specific South African fast-food franchise used social media during the hard lockdown in 2020. Stakeholder theory and the two-way symmetrical model frame this qualitative study, with data gathered through interviews and analysed using thematic content analysis. Results indicate that the PR team in the selected franchise used social media on an ad hoc basis for crisis communication, sharing information about the franchise's corporate social initiatives, reputation management, and the prevention of misinformation.

Online content creation is steadily gaining ground as an entry point into the inquiry on the endless possibilities of Web 2.0. However, few studies have assessed the precarity of content creation and its implications among university students and staff in Uganda. This paper presents findings on online content creation, focusing on distributed creativity and precarity, from a Ugandan university, based on a survey (n = 522) and key informant interviews (n = 20). Furthermore, neo-Marxist thought helps to foreground online content creation as a dialogic process that suffers from immaterial labour and domination from traditional hegemons. Ultimately, the paper calls for more studies into the notion of precarious distributed creativity, for country-wide generalisations and follow-up studies from the Global South.

This article looks at the communication repertoire of the Wits Fees Must Fall (#FMF) movement of 2015–2016. It documents and discusses the different ways in which the students communicated during their movement activities. With many scholars often praising the use of Twitter in social movements, this article speaks to the importance of looking at more than one form of communication practice and technology to make sense of the different roles played by different practices in the life of a movement. There is no doubt that social media has changed the communication environment of movement activists. Social media has many benefits for activists, which are also mentioned in this article. However, even in this new digital world, one cannot dismiss the importance of interactions that take place through other means. By discussing these various communication practices and their roles in the Wits #FMF movement, the article highlights the key role of face-to-face interactions. It shows that movement activists use different platforms to perform various communication practices at the same time for different purposes. This article consults two frameworks that encourage such a holistic understanding: Emiliano Treré and Alice Mattoni's “repertoires of communication” and Marshall McLuhan's “media ecologies”.

Discourses on active and meaningful participation and inclusion in social and cultural spaces in Kenya are not just of significant scholarly and intellectual value, they are germane in the rebuilding and democratisation of a Kenyan nation-state in the post-2007 election violence that exposed deep and historical “ethnic” fragmentations. I argue that although several contemporary television broadcasters in Kenya continue to create a perception of increasing and robust audience participation in televised content, significant forms of current participation on Kenyan television broadcasts are illusionary and futile as they largely entrench television’s power among media elites. I propose that these forms of participation, which continue to marginalise ordinary people and gate-keep everyday events, are passive and minimalist. Anchoring my conceptual discourses on convergence culture and debates on self-representation, and through a critical textual analysis of prime-time television content sampled from four television broadcasters in Kenya, I conclude that the Kenyan television broadcastscape still extensively manifests traditional approaches of “old media.” Kenyan citizenry is afforded token and peripheral participation in contemporary television workflows in which content is still largely, and in many cases almost exclusively, conceived, shaped, distributed and controlled by media elites—bodies whom they consequently largely benefit.