Sierra Leone Broadcasting Corporation (SLBC)

The Sierra Leone Broadcasting Corporation (SLBC) is the national state broadcaster of Sierra Leone, operating radio and television services nationwide from its headquarters at Jomo Kenyatta Road in the New England neighbourhood of Freetown. SLBC’s roots go back to early colonial broadcasting in Freetown in the 1930s; the SLBC Act identifies the Sierra Leone Broadcasting Service (SLBS) as the state-owned radio and television service established in 1935, with television introduced in 1963 as a partnership between SLBS and commercial operators and coverage extended to all districts and upgraded to colour in 1978. SLBC was legally established by the Sierra Leone Broadcasting Corporation Act, 2009 and operationally launched in 2010 through the transformation of SLBS and the merger with Radio UNAMSIL (the UN peacekeeping radio operation from the country’s 1999-2005 stabilisation period), with formal inauguration on 15 June 2010 by then-President Ernest Bai Koroma and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

Media assets

Television: SLBC TV — the national public-service television channel, broadcasting nationwide

Radio: SLBC Radio — the national radio service, with regional FM stations including Bo, Kenema, Kailahun, Makeni, Magburaka and Koidu, among others, providing local-language content

Ownership and governance

SLBC’s statutory basis is the SLBC Corporation Act of 2009 (Act No. 1 of 2010), which defines the corporation’s public-service mandate, ownership and governance structure. SLBC is a state-owned statutory body corporate, financed through parliamentary appropriations and other permitted revenue sources including operational income, advertising and programme income, investments, loans, and gifts and donations. The 2009 Act provides for a Board of Trustees consisting of a Chair appointed by the President subject to parliamentary approval, eight institutional representatives elected by specified national bodies, the Council of Paramount Chiefs, the Inter-Religious Council, the Women’s Forum, the Sierra Leone Bar Association, the University of Sierra Leone Engineering Department, the National Youth Council, the Sierra Leone Association of Journalists (SLAJ) and Civil Society Sierra Leone, and the Director-General as ex officio Secretary to the Board. The Board design is therefore more public-service-oriented than a straightforward government-appointee structure: it draws governance representation from chieftaincy, religious, women’s, legal, academic, youth, journalistic and civil-society sectors, with only the Chair appointed directly by the executive.

The current Director-General is Josephine Fatima Kamara, appointed by President Julius Maada Bio on 12 January 2024 and approved by the Parliament of Sierra Leone on 7 March 2024. Under the SLBC Act, the Director-General is appointed by the President on the recommendation of the Board of Trustees and subject to parliamentary approval. Kamara graduated from Fourah Bay College of the University of Sierra Leone in 1993 and began her career as a reporter at the then-SLBS during its post-civil-war revival; she subsequently worked for the Voice of America, USAID, the Sierra Leone Association of Journalists (SLAJ) and as a contributor for international networks including CNN. Her appointment was broadly welcomed by media reformers as a potential professional and editorial reset for the broadcaster.

Kamara succeeded Joseph Kapuwa, who had served as Director-General from 2018 and was reassigned in the same January 2024 round of appointments to Chair the Independent Media Commission. Kapuwa’s SLBC tenure had been the subject of scrutiny by the Anti-Corruption Commission and the SLBC Board, with reported allegations of public-funds misappropriation; his transfer to the IMC chairmanship rather than removal from public office attracted public commentary at the time. The current SLBC Deputy Director-General is Mohamed Asmieu Bah, and the Chair of the Board of Trustees is Willette James (publicly identified during the 3 March 2025 Chinese Embassy media-equipment handover ceremony).

The supervising ministry is the Ministry of Information and Civic Education (MOICE), led by Minister Chernor Bah, an SLPP cadre and former co-founder of A World At School and Purposeful, appointed in July 2023 and publicly in office by August 2023. MOICE was reorganised from the previous Ministry of Information and Communications portfolio under the Bio second-term government; a separate Ministry of Communication, Technology and Innovation now handles the digital-infrastructure and telecommunications policy portfolio.

Source of funding and budget

SLBC operates on a hybrid revenue model combining state appropriations from the national budget with operational income, advertising and programme revenue, investments, loans, and gifts and donations as permitted under the 2009 Act. The state subsidy remains the dominant component, and the broadcaster has consistently reported financial pressure including unpaid staff salaries, ageing equipment and infrastructure shortfalls.

A persistent pattern in recent years has been the gap between approved appropriations and actual disbursements by the Ministry of Finance. According to parliamentary budget oversight reports, in 2019 SLBC received only SLL 317.8 million (approximately US$34,000 at the time) out of an approved SLL 1.3 billion allocation (approximately US$140,000), a disbursement rate of roughly 24 percent. In 2020 the broadcaster received SLL 710 million (approximately US$76,700) in state support against SLL 563 million (approximately US$60,800) in self-generated commercial revenue. (The Leone was redenominated in July 2022 at a 1,000:1 ratio: 1,000 old Leones (SLL) became 1 new Leone (SLE); the pre-redenomination 2019 and 2020 figures are reported here in old Leones.)

No publicly available audited annual report or financial statement for SLBC has been identified for the 2024 or 2025 reporting cycles during this review. Local media-sector reporting and internal sources indicate that the broadcaster continues to struggle with late and partial subsidy disbursements, contributing to recurrent salary arrears and outdated production equipment.

The 2025-2026 period has also illustrated the corporation’s reliance on external support for modernisation and recovery. On 3 March 2025, Chinese Ambassador Wang Qing attended a handover ceremony at which China Media Group (CMG) donated media equipment to SLBC, with Minister Chernor Bah, Board Chair Willette James and Director-General Kamara in attendance, a follow-up to President Bio’s state visit to China. SLBC subsequently launched a CGTN Africa special programming slot, an arrangement that brings Chinese state-media content into SLBC’s schedule. In April-May 2026, MOICE confirmed that SLBC officially received a refurbished television studio facility from Africell, the country’s largest mobile operator, a private-sector infrastructure contribution that the ministry presented as a major boost to the broadcaster, but that also underlines SLBC’s continuing dependence on external support for modernisation.

The recovery context was sharpened by a fire that broke out at SLBC headquarters on Wednesday 8 April 2026 at approximately 11:30 a.m., affecting the top floor of the broadcasting house, including the office of the Deputy Director-General, and destroying laptops, desktop computers, television monitoring screens, mobile phones, office furniture, cash and critical documents. Director-General Kamara described the incident as a major setback to ongoing reforms and infrastructural upgrades. Solidarity contributions followed from the APC presidential aspirant Ibrahim Bangura, the Jeety Trading Company, the AYV Media Empire, and Orange Sierra Leone, among others, illustrating both broad-based national support for the broadcaster and its continued reliance on ad hoc external assistance for operational continuity.

Editorial independence

SLBC operates under a statutory framework that contains formal public-service and editorial-independence safeguards. The SLBC Act explicitly requires the corporation to provide independent and impartial broadcasting, to reflect all shades of opinion, to adhere to the Independent Media Commission Code of Practice, to follow a Board Code of Practice including a complaints procedure, and to operate under a section providing that the Corporation “shall not be subject to the direction or control of any person or authority.” In practice, however, these statutory guarantees have not been matched by an arm’s-length appointment system, predictable independent funding, a publicly visible and enforced editorial charter, a transparent complaints mechanism, or demonstrable insulation from government influence.

International partners including BBC Media Action, DW Akademie and UNESCO have for many years provided technical assistance, journalist training and governance support, including the BBC Media Action Protecting Independent Media for Effective Development (PRIMED) project, under which refurbished studios were handed over to SLBC in October 2022, but no published evaluation has identified a sustained shift toward editorial independence.

The most significant external assessment of SLBC’s electoral coverage is the European Union Election Observation Mission’s 2023 final report on the 24 June 2023 presidential election, which described SLBC’s legal and operational standing as making it “subservient” to government interests. The report’s media-monitoring data found clear ruling-party advantage, especially on SLBC TV, where about 90 percent of prime-time newscast coverage went to the ruling Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP), President Bio and his family, and where Bio received approximately four times more direct-quote airtime than the main opposition candidate Samura Kamara. SLBC Radio showed a more mixed picture in some direct-quotation measures but was still part of the overall public-broadcaster concern identified by the mission.

A significant 2026 internal-discipline case also illustrated the tension between SLBC management control and journalist expression. The Independent Media Commission ruled on 25 February 2026 (made public in mid-March) that SLBC had unlawfully terminated former journalist Umu Thoronka and ordered the broadcaster to compensate her. Thoronka had been dismissed in July 2024 after posting a TikTok video documenting a Presidential Town Hall incident in which a woman was publicly humiliated for questioning President Bio about the rising cost of living. The IMC, after three hearings beginning in November 2024, concluded that SLBC “failed to exercise due diligence in handling the termination process.” The case has also been filed at the Community Court of Justice of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) by Women in the Media Sierra Leone (WIMSAL) and RFK Human Rights, alleging violations of Thoronka’s rights to freedom of expression, dignity, non-discrimination and safe working conditions. The ruling shows both that SLBC remains vulnerable to politically sensitive internal disciplinary action and that the IMC can provide some external remedy. (The IMC’s chair is the former SLBC Director-General Joseph Egbenda Kapuwa, who took up the regulatory chairmanship in January 2024.)

These structural conditions place SLBC in the State-Controlled (SC) category. The SLBC Act contains formal public-service safeguards, including duties of independent and impartial broadcasting, political balance, adherence to the IMC Code of Practice and non-direction by any person or authority. In practice, however, these safeguards have not created arm’s-length governance or reliable editorial autonomy: the Director-General and Board Chair are appointed through presidential/parliamentary channels (even where institutional representatives are elected by their sectoral bodies), the broadcaster remains dependent on parliamentary appropriations and irregular state disbursement, no current publicly enforced editorial charter, Board complaints procedure or ombudsman was identified during this review, and the EU EOM’s 2023 assessment found that SLBC’s legal and operational standing made it subservient to government interests in election coverage. The SC classification therefore continues to apply for 2026.

AI and digital policy

SLBC operates a digital news platform at slbc.gov.sl and maintains social-media and streaming channels alongside its core terrestrial broadcasting. No publicly available SLBC-specific newsroom policy on AI-generated content, synthetic-media disclosure, content-provenance standards such as C2PA, or the use of generative-AI tools in editorial production was identified during this review. At the sector level, the Government of Sierra Leone approved its first National Data Protection Policy on 21 April 2026, with Cabinet authorising the drafting of a new Data Protection and Right to Access Information Act that would combine data protection and access-to-information oversight into a single authority — repealing the existing Right to Access Information Commission Act in the process. The reform is being piloted jointly by MOICE and the Ministry of Communication, Technology and Innovation. Implementation will define the regulatory environment within which SLBC’s digital and AI-related practices operate.

June 2026