ATLANTA, US--Malawi’s Information Minister Patricia Kaliati doesn't like ‘Action Girl’, Weekend Times’ huge attraction which helps the paper fly off the newsstand.

On Fridays, the day the paper hits the streets, readers quickly turn to page eight – Action Girl is also called Page 8 by readers - where a picture of a scantily dressed female is splashed.

“Why pay a girl child to pose in the nude?” Kaliati was quoted saying by Weekend Express, which is published by the Malawi Institute of Journalism.

“How would you feel to see your daughter or sister exposed like that?” the minister, waving a copy of the paper, wanted to know. “What a shame!”

Kaliati was speaking at the launch of the Malawi Child Protection and Gender Media Network.

Applauding journalists for the initiative and pledging government support in efforts to expose abuse against children, the minister said Action Girl was demeaning to women and that it put young girls and women at risk.

She called on journalists to campaign for the removal of Page 8 from Weekend Times.

Malawi’s conservative society prefers not to discuss issues about sex openly. And it’s not hard to find Action Girl, in a bikini and striking a suggestive pose, offensive to the moral sensibilities of some individuals.

But others have argued that soft-porn Action Girl isn’t indecent at all. They underline the fact that those who pose for Weekend Times aren’t minors and that they do so using free will. If the paper uses pictures from elsewhere, the pictures are of adults, not children.

Advocates of free expression have cautioned against Kaliati’s sentiment, saying it could lead to government censorship. Last year, the Mutharika administration passed a controversial law which empowers a minister, who can use subjective interpretation of content, to ban a publication on grounds that its material is against the public interest.
 
Weekend Times, known for exposing influential individuals including politicians, has in the past run into trouble with the authorities who said the paper was being published illegally. For some months, the paper taken was out of circulation.

This popular newspaper is published by the company that is owned by the family of the country’s first president, Dr. Kamuzu Banda, who was in power from 1964-1994.

During Banda's 30 years in power, the government controlled what people saw or read. When Malawians in 1992 called for political pluralism, Banda initially resisted change but he eventually caved under pressure. The new open society also blunted the censors’ scalpel: people were now free to access materials of their choice.

As Kaliati pushes for the “death” of Action Girl, what would Banda, who regarded himself as the custodian of Malawi women and always warned, sternly, against abusing “my mbumba”, say about Page 8? The reader’s guess is as good as this correspondent’s.
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©2012 The Maravi Post. Reproduction authorised, with usual acknowledgment