The trouble with newspapers distribution in Cameroon

Neither the main distributor Messapresse, nor owners of kiosks or itinerant vendors are reassuring

By Essan Ekoninyam in Yaounde

Newspapers are poorly distributed

 in Cameroon

The sector of newspaper distribution in Cameroon is increasingly becoming one of headache. At a time when state subvention to the media is paltry and almost nothing to write home about, when advertising is hard to come by – especially to English language newspapers – when sales are far from encouraging due to apathy on the part of the reading public, and when the cost of production is skyrocketing as a result of the high prices of paper, publishers, who should have been comforted by an easy and profitable distribution of their product, are somewhat frustrated by this aspect which is very important in the production chain.

                A major source of their worry is Messapresse, the main newspaper distribution company in the country. It has come to the notice of newspaper publishers that this company no longer owns vehicles that used to enable them to do their distribution job in the past. Nowadays, Messapresse relies on private transporters and gives preferences to some newspapers, particularly the government-own daily, Cameron Tribune, and some private dailies.

                In addition to this is the fact that the charges of Messapresse are more than exorbitant. They charge more than sixty percent of the newspapers they distribute, leaving their publishers barely chickenfeed to run the paper.

                To try to improve on their situation in the market, some publishers ignore Messapresse completely and do the distribution using their own private networks. In such situations, they are greatly handicapped in the sense that their newspapers are not read in many parts of the country where they are not able to reach but which the distribution company gets to in spite of their lack of sufficient vehicles.

                For their part, other publishers use Messapresse plus their private networks to distribute their newspapers, in which case the money that gets into their coffers is more compared to those who use the services of Messapresse exclusively.

                Experience has shown that employing one’s private network can be risky too, given that newspaper kiosk owners or itinerant vendors can be very mischievous. Cases abound where vendors sell and disappear with all the money as well as leftover copies of the newspapers. 

                Talking about the case of using the services of Messapresse exclusively, one of the main problems faced by publishers is their inability to get back all the unsold copies from the distributing company. In this case they can hardly tell if the little amount of money given them by Messapresse is justified or not.

                It was in the light of the foregoing that another newspaper distribution company held a meeting with some newspaper publishers on Friday, 27 May 2016. Not much filtered out of the meeting, especially as it was not heavily attended. However, The Median, which was not invited to the meeting, learned that the same complaints as mentioned above were raised. Another such meeting, we were told, has been scheduled for the not-too-distant future.