Professor Kwame Karikari discusses media reform initiatives in West Africa with Spencer Graves.Professor Karikari was born in 1947 in what was then the Gold Coast, which merged with smaller neighbors to become Ghana as it became the first colony in Sub-Saharan Africa to achieve sovereignty in 1957 under the leadership of Kwame Nkrumah. In the 1970s Karikari obtained a bachelor's degree from the City College of New York and a master's from Columbia and wrote for various newspapers focusing especially on Black life in the US and liberation movements internationally. He began teaching communications at the University of Ghana in 1979 and served as Director General of the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation between 1982 and 1984.Post-independence Ghana had been governed initially by a series of mostly authoritarian governments, which usually changed by military coups. A leading figure in Ghanaian politics beginning in 1979 was Jerry Rawlings, whose military government incarcerated Karikari for 18 months without charges, presumably because they were not happy with Karikari's advocacy of democracy and freedom of the media and expression. In 1991 Rawlings started leading Ghana to a multi-party elections and was elected to two terms as President 1993-2001.Karkari founded the Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA) in 1998.[9] In addition to his many reports as a journalist, Karikari is an author or editor of at least six books, four of which deal with media:(1994) Independent broadcasting in Ghana : implications and challenges : proceedings of the National Conference on the Promotion and Privatization of Radio and Television Broadcasting in Ghana(2000) The law and the media in Ghana(2013) The Ghanaian media: national peace and cohesion(2014) The paradox of voice without accountability in GhanaHe is also author of a chapter on "Media Reform Initiatives in West Africa" in Freedman et al. (2016) Strategies for Media Reform: International perspectives.[10]A moderated discussion of the issues raised in this issue in this interview along with highlights is supported in the Wikiversity article on this interview.Copyright 2025 Kwame Karikari and Spencer Graves, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 international license.