La Société Sénégalaise de Presse et de Publications (SSPP) was established in 1970. The company’s main activity is publishing the daily newspaper Le Soleil, which is the heir of Paris-Dakar, a newspaper created in 1933 by the journalist Charles de Breteuil.
Media assets
Publishing: Le Soleil
State Media Matrix: Captured Public/State-Managed or State-Owned (CaPu)
Ownership and governance
When it was established in 1970, SSPP was a limited liability company. In 1983, the company was transformed into a publicly owned company. The State of Senegal is SSPP’s majority owner. Various other public bodies and institutions own minority stakes in the company, according to data from local experts and journalists. SSPP is subordinated to the Ministry of Culture and Communication.
In 2022, the staff at Le Soleil accused the head of the newspaper of poor management. In a news conference, they said that the director Yakham Mbaye not only is a bad manager but also has disrespectful behavior in his relations with the staff, cutting their salaries for no apparent reason and regularly insulting his journalists.
Lamine Niang, appointed general director of Le Soleil in early June 2024, said he planned to digitize the newspaper and modernize its IT infrastructure to improve the publisher’s sources of income.
Source of funding and budget
SSPP is funded through a combination of revenues from sales of newspaper copies and advertising, and a state subsidy. There is no evidence that the state subsidy accounts for more than half of SSPP’s annual budget or represents the company’s highest turnover share.
Editorial independence
According to local journalists and experts in Senegal consulted for this report in April 2024, like all state media in Senegal, Le Soleil, the main publication run by SSPP, is editorially controlled by the government. These views echo older reports about Le Soleil from Media Foundation for West Africa, a regional media freedom NGO. The newspaper has also become a staunch supporter of the Chinese government, regularly publishing pro-Beijing content, according to reports from Freedom House, an NGO based in the U.S.
No domestic statute and no independent oversight or assessment mechanism to validate the editorial independence of Le Soleil have been identified.
July 2024