A French company was charging Burkinabè people to watch their own national television
Burkina Faso’s Higher Council for Communication has fined Canal+ International 200 million CFA francs, around 350,000 dollars. It is the second fine in two months, and it is four times larger than the first.
Here is what the fight is actually about. RTB, Radiodiffusion Télévision du Burkina, is the national broadcaster. It belongs to the country. It is funded by the public and it carries the news, the language and the culture of Burkina Faso to its own people. Under a 2024 agreement that Canal+ International signed with the regulator, the company is required to carry RTB’s channels free of charge for viewers in Burkina Faso, including subscribers whose paid packages have expired.
Canal+ did not do that. And the detail in the regulator’s June order tells you exactly how it was working. Burkinabè viewers were being made to send SMS messages to unlock access to their own state television. A French company had placed a toll gate between a nation and its own broadcaster, and was collecting on every crossing.
On 12 June, the regulator fined Canal+ 50 million CFA francs and gave the company 30 days to remove every technical barrier standing between Burkinabè people and RTB, with no SMS required. The deadline came and went. The obstacles stayed. So the regulator returned with a fine four times the size and a statement noting its regret that its decision had not been implemented in the time given.
Understand why this small story carries weight. Canal+ is one of the most powerful media companies operating on this continent, and its pay-TV packages reach millions of African homes. For decades, companies like this have operated in Africa on the quiet assumption that local regulators are decorative, that agreements signed with African governments are suggestions, and that a deadline from an African authority can be allowed to pass without consequence. Very often that assumption has been correct.
Burkina Faso is refusing to make it correct. The country did not invent a rule to punish a foreign firm. It enforced a contract the company signed with its own hand, and when that was ignored, it enforced it harder. That is what a functioning sovereign state looks like. Not shouting, not seizing, simply insisting that the law applies to foreign companies exactly as it applies to everyone else.
Media is sovereignty too. A nation that cannot guarantee its own people access to its own broadcaster does not fully control the story told about itself. Burkina Faso has been reclaiming its gold, its currency debate, its uniforms and its curriculum. This week it reclaimed the airwaves.
#HistoricalAfrica #BurkinaFaso #CanalPlus #MediaSovereignty #AES