Nila McCann
French PR racketeer Jean-Michel Metthey’s collaborator
Offices of pro-Kabila media Groupe L’Avenir
Kinshasa, September 2011
The pro-Kabila daily L’Avenir published on Friday, September 9, an article entitled “Soon in Paris the magazine Le Point will write on Joseph Kabila.” The irony I find in reading the article is that it reads like a publicity insert about Jean-Michel Metthey and his outfit, who are alleged to be about to produce a pro-Kabila 12-page publicity insert for the French mag Le Point. In fact, the author of the article—Doudou Esungi—seems to be totally unaware of the concept of publicity insert, which in French, goes by the fancy name of “publi-reportage.” Esungi seems to be unaware that the Kabila campaign would actually be coughing up the dough for the totally useless publicity insert in a magazine catering to the French elite of the center-right of the political spectrum. In other words, no one would ever read these publicity inserts. They’d maybe be used by movers (from North- or Sub-Saharan Africa) to wrap up cups or photo frames while moving the belongings of those French elite members from one Parisian fancy apartment to the next fancy apartment.
But the naïve reporter of L’Avenir thinks otherwise: “Le Point will devote a huge space to the reconstruction of the DRC begun by the president of the DRC, Joseph Kabila Kabange.”
Gone already out of orbit, the article now reaches the fringes of the outworld, but there’s still hope we could dock in Deep-Space-Nine orbital station:
“It will be a matter for this weekly magazine to publish an article written by Nila McCann and Jean-Michel Metthey, two directors of the agency “Universal Communication,” in order to depict the Congolese political scene often less understood from abroad, all the while highlighting this electoral rendezvous that is crucial to our country— a country shaken by recurrent wars for too long. In this period devoted to the submission of candidacies and strewn with habitual but often temporary troubles among rival political parties, the reporting of the magazine Le Point should contribute to enlighten the outside world on the Congolese political environment.”
Captain's log: I was wrong, the spaceship had overshot the orbital station by a few light-years and it’s now perilously heading straight towards an event horizon:
“If we are to believe Nila McCann, one of the directors of this agency, Le Point recently published a report that shed light on the positive aspects of the Congolese economy, its development, and particularly the big economic entities. [The report] also aimed at showing the five-pronged development plan [Kabila’s “Cinq chantiers”] in progress and how the country is attracting foreign investors; and [the report also strived] to change the mindset of the international community on a country with important potentials. This report of a dozen pages also dwelled on the trump cards of the government, be they financial and budgetary, or at the infrastructural level. It also highlighted a side of the country often overlooked or hardly known in foreign media, Nila McCann confided. Le Point, a prestigious weekly, boasts a high-quality readership across the world with a wide distribution in about 47 Francophone countries.”
Oh, my! Is this a highway robbery in progress or what? How could people insult the intelligence of an entire nation like that and get paid millions of dollars for doing so? Does L’Avenir seriously think that in this economy the entire editorial board of Le Point had suddenly run mad to waste its newspaper with a “report of a dozen pages” on Kabila’s “cinq chantiers”? Has this irresponsible journalist even bothered to check the web portal of Le Point before writing down such nonsense? What happened to the basic 5-Ws of good reporting?
Jean-Michel Metthey is a PR racketeer, a kind of publicity vampire (sorry for the fans of True Blood out there) whose scheme is to stalk vulnerable and moneyed Third-World politicians desperate for international attention, and suck them dry.
But the man by no means invented this scheme. Even unsophisticated Congolese journalists know this kind of swindle. They call it with a Congolese untranslatable slang word of “coupage”—meaning, “I’m not going to report on this event unless you pay me to do it!”
Pity! Congolese journalists need to learn it from professional swindlers like Jean-Michel Metthey. Or from the prestigious sharks of Paris-based Jeune Afrique. The Beninois star journalist Francis Kpatindé used to write for Jeune Afrique (he now works for the UN system), owned by the Tunisian Paris transplant Béchir Ben Yahmed aka BBY who, incidentally, also despises Black Africans (read Kpatindé’s resignation letter on the same link). After 19 years spent reporting for Jeune Afrique, Kpatindé was terminated in 2005 for not bringing in enough money from publicity inserts paid for by African leaders—for he was supposed to also double as a publicity agent while doing his reporting on the African continent--and for questioning his boss and his friends' blatant anti-black racism!
There’s no other word to describe the system set in place by Jeune Afrique owner BBY than racketeering:
“In his system, in principle, journalists play both their role and the role of “commercial agents,” if one wants to be politically correct—but more precisely as “bag carriers” between Africa’s palaces and the rue d’Auteuil, in Paris [headquarters of Jeune Afrique]. Thus, François Soudan, the editorial director, has his extremely fertile “mission field”: Cameroon, Togo, Mauritania. He writes extremely kindly for these country’s regimes, particularly when they are experiencing some difficulties, and must explain themselves on their human rights violations or [their infringement of the] freedom of the press, [and he] establishes special relations with heads of state, negotiates all forms of publicity inserts, diverse consultancy contracts, and is gratified, he and his newspaper, in various fashions.”
Reporter and columnist Francis Kpatinde
Fired by Jeune Afrique Tunisian owner Béchir Ben Yahmed aka BBY for not playing his role of money-courier and for decrying the racism of his boss and his pals
There’s a rumor on Kinshasa Radio-Trottoir [Sidewalk radio, the Congolese grapevine) whose authorship is attributed to DRC Communication Minister Lambert Mende that has this very same François Soudan
Well, I don’t usually give much credence to whatever comes out of the mouth of Lambert Mende, till I check and double-check. But this time around, I’d take him at his word, if what Radio-Trottoir claims about his being the author of the rumor is true.
But this digression risks going out of control. Let’s turn back to our subject: French PR racketeer Jean-Michel Metthey…
The man went to Manilla, in the Philippines, in December 2010 where he was introduced by the newsprint The Philippine Star as the “international director” of Le Figaro, “the most influential newspaper and read by decision-makers in the French government. Metthey handles the World News Report that does country reports for Le Figaro.” Note here that it’s Le Figaro, not Le Point. The man is a middleman who peddles his bootlegs between these two center-right news magazines. A middleman who hardly spends any money buying merchandise. In fact, the PR merchandise is given to him freely with an extortionate bonus in cash. He then goes back to France and buys for cheap publicity space in Parisian newsprints. So, I surmise...
In Manilla, he was accompanied, not by Nila McCann, but by one Joachim Lanthier. I almost wore my eyesight Googling these characters for the past few days. There were for instance lengthy discussions in October 2010—two months before the Philippines stint of the racketeer—by major French Wikipedia contributors about the wisdom of including a Jean-Michel Metthey page in the august encyclopedia (the man might have attempted to write his own page, I suspect). But the collective cyberwisdom prevailed: the page was killed. One of the French Wikipedia “overseers” (this is my own expression to describe them) who voted to kill the page wrote: “Difficult to have an idea [of the man], the rare bits and pieces of information on this person are too vague to vouch for his notoriety, and the sources aren’t reliable enough to make it into an acceptable article.” Wow! This is cruel, but right—I was shaking with renewed respect for Wikipedia while reading this… Keep in mind that these discussions on Wikepedia were taking place about six months after the election of Benigno Aquino to the presidency of the Republic of the Philippines! The Wikipedia people couldn't find anything meaningful because this bright guy often operates in the shadows--a PR spook, if that!
Now, read the following talking points Jean-Michel Metthey gave The Philippine Star in contradistinction to the talking points Nila McCann gave L’Avenir (and there is more in The Philippine Star if you care to check out):
1) Le Figaro is a “French national daily that boasts of a readership of over “two million internationally-minded decision makers and key personalities” in over 53 French-speaking countries from Africa to Southeast Asia to Canada and all over Europe";
2) “Through Le Figaro, Matthey pointed out, the French people will get to know the latest developments in the Philippines in the series of “special reports” his team is coming up with for their widely read newspaper”;
3) “Our readers want to know where the opportunities in terms of investments are and what exactly are the realities on the ground, and what are the realities about the laws, incentives, and the policy that will take place with President Aquino,” he pointed out”; and
4) “The basis of the report will be positive in which the recently won elections of His Excellency Benigno Aquino III of the Republic of the Philippines will be strongly cited along with the political and economic agendas that he wishes to implement,” Metthey pointed out.”
Is this Metthey/Matthey guy a broken CD or what?
Before the Philippines, the man was spotted in 2008 in Nouakchott, in Mauritania, where he went to sell his services to the military junta that had kicked out of office the elected president in a coup. Upon his return to Paris, he delivered. The issue no. 20 064 of Le Figaro included a 2-page publicity insert on Mauritania, which the Mauritanian opposition collective called Union des Forces du Progrès claimed was paid 100,000 euros. In that publicity insert, Jean-Michel Metthey is quoted as an authority on Mauritania. What’s more, the Union des Forces du Progrès decried above all that “100 thousand euros, taken from the meager budget of the Mauritanian state were injected into the coffers of Le Figaro. Just as were the other 500 thousand euros into the coffers of Le Point.”
The opposition then added: “The junta gave the task of this ruinous publicity campaign to the agency Universel Communications Matthey Production. It is the same agency that produced the publicity in the two French newspapers, Le Point (8 pages) and Le Figaro (2 pages).”
The question that comes to mind is the following: is this serial producer of “publi-reportages” operating solo or in cahoots with these two prestigious French media powerhouses? Be that as it may, the Kabila campaign seems to be managed by a bunch of morons devoid of the slightest basic political sense and research skills.
It’s baffling to see these people waste energy and money on such fruitless endeavors. As I said above, there’s no way French readers would waste their time reading a publicity insert on an African country. You kidding me?
This is not the way to do things when you want to refurbish the tarnished image of your leader abroad. Mobutu had more sense: he hired big-time lobbyists in Washington, DC, who, as it turned out, failed to paint him as a benign enlightened despot ruling demented Africans ready to run amok anytime. More importantly, Congolese impoverished media groups survive by the daily miracle of God—on top of losing their signals at the slightest delay in paying their taxes that go right into some people's pockets. They can’t pay their reporters, who survive by the pittance of the “coupages” they painstakingly collect left and right. Besides, wasting this kind of monies while teachers and public servants are striking for salary arrears borders on the criminal. It would make more sense if these monies being thrown
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