FOREIGN MEDIA GIVE FULL PICTURE

I have found during the three years I have lived in Swaziland that if I want to really know what’s going on in the kingdom, I should not bother with the Swazi media.

I find you get a much clearer and truer picture of what’s happening here from the foreign press and international agencies.

This is sometimes because Swaziland is not a democracy and some information is deliberately withheld from the people (think of the reports about King Mswati III’s huge wealth that appeared in August 2007 in overseas’ media but never saw the light of day in Swaziland as an example).

Another reason why we get a raw deal from the Swaziland media is because they aren’t very good.

I was reminded of this again last week when I saw a report about the drought we are suffering in the kingdom. The Swazi media has been carrying lots of reports about the kingdom’s capital Mbabane going on water rationing and very occasionally there is something about how people in rural areas are suffering. But none of the news media have identified the very real prospect of economic collapse in the kingdom caused by the drought.

It has taken the foreign media to alert us to the possibility that overseas’ investors will pull out of Swaziland if the water supplies do not improve.

The international agency, IRIN, reported a Swaziland Parliamentary Select Committee that met in September 2007 being warned by several businesses that if the government failed to deliver on the promise of adequate water to run their operations, they would pull out of the country.

This information was freely available to journalists, but I have seen no reference to it in the Swazi media.

A report of the Select Committee said that in Nhlangano, provincial capital of the southern Shiselweni Region, Asian-owned garment factories employ over 5,000 Swazi whereas five years ago there was not a single manufacturing job in the area.

IRIN reported the Select Committee saying, ‘Unless an alternative water supply is sourced from the Mkhondvo River [which bends across the southern third of the country], as promised many years ago [factory owners] said they would have no alternative but to relocate to Lesotho, where there is a huge supply of water.’

One industrialist told the Select Committee that government gave little thought to providing for the water, electricity and waste-disposal needs of industry. ‘They just built the factory shells and roads, and invited us to move in,’ the IRIN report said.

The consequences of the drought could bring Swaziland’s already failing economy tumbling to its knees and this information was freely available to the Swazi media. Why then did the story not appear?

I think that there are three possible explanations. The first is that the Swazi media did see the report but chose not to report it, since government incompetence is being blamed for the crisis. The second possible explanation is that reporters missed the story because they were busy doing something else (fretting over the Miss Swaziland beauty contest if the acres of news pages devoted to that subject is anything to go by.)

The third explanation? They did see the report but didn’t understand its significance.

Participants at a recent workshop that looked at how the media covered environmental issues concluded that the Swaziland media was only interested in sleazy and sensational stories. When you look at what the newspapers choose to cover and when they miss a story as important as this one, it is hard not to agree with them.