For a decade, the single biggest complaint Malagasy musicians have made about their own copyright office has been the same one: that the Ministry of Communication and Culture runs it, in practice, no matter what the law on paper says about its independence. The public record now shows exactly how literally that was true. From at least 10 February 2022 until 6 August 2026, the same person held two jobs that are supposed to check each other: Director General of Culture inside the ministry, and Président du Conseil d’Administration, the board chair, of OMDA (Office Malgache du Droit d’Auteur), Madagascar’s sole music and literary copyright collecting society.
That person is Francis Razafiarison, a comedian better known by his stage name, Francis Turbo. He was appointed Director General of Culture at the ministry in February 2019. By the time he gave a press interview on 10 February 2022, he identified himself in the same breath as both the ministry’s culture chief and OMDA’s board chair, defending the ministry’s decision days earlier to dismiss OMDA’s long-serving director. He held both titles until 6 August 2026, when artist and ethnomusicologist Jimmy Hilarion Rakotonavory was elected to succeed him as OMDA board chair for a three-year term.
OMDA’s own founding decree, No. 98-434 of 16 June 1998, issued under Madagascar’s 1995 copyright law, describes it as a public institution with its own legal personality and “administrative and financial autonomy,” placed only under the ministry’s technical and administrative supervision and the finance ministry’s financial oversight. The decree does not say the ministry’s own staff should chair OMDA’s board. Nothing in the document reviewed for this piece prohibits it either. What the overlap meant, in practice, for four and a half years, is that the body meant to check the ministry’s influence over OMDA was chaired by a ministry official.
A director dismissed three times since 2015#
Razafiarison’s dual role sits inside a longer, well-documented churn at the top of OMDA. Haja Ranjarivo led the office for roughly twenty years before the Council of Ministers first removed him in November 2015, over embezzlement allegations he denied. The council reversed that decision and reinstated him in November 2016. He was dismissed a second time on 2 February 2022, when the Council of Ministers abrogated his appointment decree. Razafiarison, speaking for the ministry, said an internal audit had found “une mauvaise gestion,” poor management, and that Ranjarivo was “no longer fit” to carry out needed reforms.
Each of those reversals landed on top of unpaid royalties. Weeks after the 2022 dismissal, the Syndicat des artistes malgaches, Madagascar’s artists’ union, held a press conference led by deputy-artist and musician Paul Bert Rahasimanana, known as Rossy, and union member Dama. They said songwriters had received no author’s royalties for more than a year, blamed OMDA’s management rather than the artists, and separately objected that the ministry, not artists, controlled OMDA’s own website.
Rossy did more than complain. As a sitting National Assembly deputy, he filed a bill in June 2022 to amend OMDA’s statutes so the ministry could no longer intervene in its internal affairs. Razafiarison, for the ministry, called the initiative “welcome.” The bill passed the National Assembly, but as late as 3 August 2023, it was still waiting on the Senate, and the ministry stated plainly on its own social media page that OMDA “reste sous la responsabilité du MCC,” remains under the ministry’s responsibility, until the law was validated. No source checked for this piece shows that bill was ever validated by the Senate or came into force in the form Rossy proposed.
In between, the acute 2022 standoff was resolved the ordinary way: on 12 April 2023, the Council of Ministers appointed Joelinirina Nomenasoa Rarivojaona, previously OMDA’s own head of collections, as the new director. Rossy publicly welcomed the choice. Under Rarivojaona, OMDA published a 2024 royalty-distribution calendar disclosing a flat 6 percent deduction on gross box-office receipts from paid shows, the only specific collection rate found in any source reviewed for this piece. No source checked states how or when Rarivojaona’s time in the post ended.
The third return, and a contradiction about what came first#
What is documented is what came next. On 8 December 2025, the Council of Ministers appointed Ranjarivo director for a third time, nearly four years after his second dismissal. The handover took effect two days later. Reached by phone, Ranjarivo told reporters he “had not personally envisaged returning to the post” but accepted the responsibility “with humility,” and said the move followed “artists’ own requests” made directly to Madagascar’s new culture minister.
Two Malagasy outlets covering that reappointment do not agree on its sequence, and this piece is not resolving it for them. NewsMada reported that Ranjarivo’s reinstatement came five days after OMDA’s “statut révisé,” a revised statute, had already been adopted, implying the new rules came first and his appointment followed under them. L’Express de Madagascar’s own account instead frames the statute’s revision as something carried out under his renewed leadership, implying the reverse order. Neither outlet names a decree number, publishes the statute’s text, or states specifically what it changes. Whether that revised statute is the same instrument as Rossy’s stalled 2022 autonomy bill, a different administrative decree, or something else entirely could not be established from any source checked.
Eight months after Ranjarivo’s return, the diagnosis from inside OMDA itself had not changed much. On 6 August 2026, newly elected board chair Jimmy Hilarion Rakotonavory, succeeding Razafiarison, told the press: “Le problème, c’est la loi qui encadre l’argent des artistes,” the problem is the law that governs artists’ money. He said he wanted to find ways to grow OMDA’s income and make how it spends that money, expense approvals included, more transparent to the artists it represents.
What this means for artists#
For a Malagasy songwriter or performer, none of this is abstract. OMDA is, by law, the only body authorised to collect and distribute royalties for recorded and performed music in Madagascar; there is no alternative collecting society to register with instead. That means every period in which OMDA’s leadership was contested, from the 2015 dismissal through the 2022 standoff to whatever changed, or didn’t, in December 2025, was also a period in which the one channel for collecting broadcast, live-show and venue royalties was itself unstable. The union’s own 2022 complaint that artists had gone over a year without payment was not a one-off; it is the recurring cost of a leadership fight that keeps restarting roughly once every few years.
The specific finding here, that one man ran both the supervising ministry’s culture department and the supervised collecting society’s board for over four years, is not evidence of theft or fraud; no document reviewed alleges either, and this piece does not either. It is evidence that the “autonomy” OMDA’s own 1998 decree claims on paper did not, for that period, extend to who sat in the room making the society’s decisions. Whether the December 2025 statute revision changes that, or simply reshuffled the same small set of officials into new chairs, is a question this desk could not answer from the public record, and will keep checking.
