July 10, 2005
Hard talking
The BBC's HARDtalk show has been on a tour of East Africa this week giving the kind of hard-hitting interviews you rarely hear on the local media. The two interviews with Meles Zenawi, Ethiopia's prime minister, and Hailu Shawel, chairman of the main opposition Coalition for Unity and Democracy (CUD), have had a huge impact over here.
Transcripts have appeared in most of the newspapers. People keep e-mailing quotes to each other. Everyone is talking about them and arguing about who came off best. Here are links to the Meles and Hailu interviews as reprinted by The Reporter on Friday. (Here are the BBC summaries for Meles and Hailu with links to video feeds). The cartoon shows Capital's take on what happened.
The general feeling is that both men had a tough time keeping up with the questions of interviewer Stephen Sackur. For what it's worth, I think they both did better than his next target, Kenya's information minister Raphael Tuju.
Posted by aheavens at July 10, 2005 2:20 PM