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Wednesday 6 August 2008

FOUR IN TEN SWAZIS FACE STARVATION

It is a great pity that in Swaziland many journalists do not understand what they are writing about.

This leads them to simply copy down word for word from press releases they have been given by organisations seeking publicity, without revealing to their readers, listeners, or viewers, what lies behind the words.

This does a disservice to the people the journalists are supposed to be serving and keeps vital information from them.

I was reminded of this yesterday (5 August 2008) by two reports in the Swazi Observer.

Both reports were based on a United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Human Development report on Swaziland.

This is how one of the Observer reports started, ‘SWAZILAND’S high Human Poverty Index (HPI), which indicates that the country has one of the most deprived populations in the world, is inconsistent with its lower middle income status.

‘A recent United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Human Development report states that the HPI shows fundamental problems in the distribution of past gains, as the high growth of earlier years failed to trickle down to the majority of the people.’

‘“Even in money metric terms, poverty in Swaziland is very high,” states the report.’

The other report was about the health of Swaziland’s economy and stated, ‘“The emerging international trade architecture under the auspices of the World Trade Organisation, which is pushing for reduced tariffs, will further erode Swaziland’s receipts from the Southern African Customs Union (SACU),” the report states.

‘“Mention must also be made of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) trade protocol that is consistent with the global thrust for lower tariff walls. Fiscal policy, therefore, faces a big challenge to protect expenditures that are important for human development, even as overall expenditure is being cut. It calls for the overhauling of expenditure patterns.”

Do you know what any of that means? If I were a betting man I’d wager the reporter hadn’t a clue.

The UNDP is full of technical language otherwise known as ‘jargon’. Economists might well understand what it means, but ordinary readers would not. That is why it is the job of journalists to explain it to them.

In Swaziland where journalists are often hired ‘off the street’ with little experience and no relevant qualifications for the job (but media houses find them cheap to employ) the level of professional competence is very low. I don’t think even journalists themselves would argue with that statement. Readers are short changed by this lack of expertise and it is difficult to see things changing unless the media houses are prepared to invest more in salaries for journalists and reward them well if they develop their careers.

Now back to the UNDP.

What the UNDP report actually said (and the readers will not know) is that Swaziland is not a poor country. It is neither one of the poorest nor the richest countries in the world. It is (unsurprisingly) therefore known and a middle income country. The problem in Swaziland is that the wealth that is created in Swaziland goes to a very small number of people. Therefore, some people are very rich (I’ll leave it to you to supply the names) while 70 per cent of the population of about one million people live below the official poverty line with an income of less than on US dollar (E7) per day.

One line in the UNDP report (as copied out by the Observer) said, ‘“In addition, 37% [of the population] were deemed to be living in extreme poverty, which is indigence or destitution, lacking the ability to satisfy even minimal food intake necessary for an active life.”

Or to translate in plain English: ‘Nearly four people in ten people are so poor they are starving to death.’

The UNDP report also warned (yet again) that the Swazi Government had to cut back on expenditure and could not expect the high levels of income from the Southern African Customs Union (SACU) that it has had in the past (that’s what all the stuff about ‘emerging international trade architecture’ in the extract I quoted earlier is about).

So to summarise: ‘four in ten people in Swaziland face starvation and the already fragile Swaziland economy is about to be destroyed.’

I hope you would agree with me that the Swazi Observer seems to have missed a pretty good story.

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