The two boys, aged about seven years (nobody seems sure of their exact ages), were first featured in the Swazi Observer last Tuesday (20 November 2007) when the newspaper reported the children ‘try to survive under horrendous conditions’ with no family to support them.
Each morning in their ragged school uniforms they walk the 10 kilometres from their home to school where ‘they cut a strange picture among the sea of pupils at the school’.
The boys were reported to often go without meals for days.
The Observer went into overdrive with the story following it up several times over the next few days. By Saturday (24 November 2007) individual people and companies had made donations of food, clothing, bicycles and cash. The head of a security company had decided to adopt the boys (although what rights the boys had in this matter is not stated).
By Saturday each boy had a bank account with E3,000 in it. To put this into some context, 70 per cent of the population of Swaziland live on less than E7 (one US dollar) a day.
On the face of it this is a heart-warming story of kind people helping out some children who are in desperate circumstances. I don’t want to criticise people for being generous to the children but I do think the Observer has rather missed the point with the story.
As I said earlier, 70 per cent of the population of Swaziland or about 700,000 people live on less than one US dollar a day. That pittance of an income means most people in Swaziland go hungry most of the time. About 66 per cent of the population is unable to meet basic food needs, while 43 per cent live in chronic poverty. Or put another way, the two boys featured in the Observer this week are not really much different from anyone else.
Not for the first time the Swazi media have failed to put a news story in context. The Observer makes these two boys out to be an exception to the general lifestyles in Swaziland, when in fact they are the rule.
The Observer editor should have been able to make this connection himself if only he read his own newspaper. The two boys were not the only stories of poverty in the newspaper this week.
On Monday (19 November 2007) the day before the story about the two boys broke the Observer carried an article by Pastor Ken Jefferson where he tells the story of a gogo (grandmother) in a remote rural community who was looking after many orphan children in the community. When Pastor Jefferson visited the community the gogo pleaded for food for the children. ‘The look of relief as she was handed some milk, some mealie-meal and some oil was only too evident, and she seemed possessed of new strength,’ he wrote.
The Weekend Observer (24 November 2007) also carried a report from a different rural community where ‘starvation attacks many families’. The Weekend Observer reported, ‘So serious is the situation that poverty has affected all and sundry at Nginamadolo. Even the chief’s inner council survive from hand to mouth. There is no food on the table.’
Poverty is endemic in Swaziland, but to read the newspapers you would think it was an isolated incident. The Weekend Observer in an editorial comment about the two boys reminded its readers that 70 per cent of the population lived on less than a dollar a day, but it made no connection between this statistic and the boys’ plight. Instead, the newspaper believed the issue was about the lack of government grants for school uniforms that would have benefited the boys.
The media academic Prof Guy Berger of Rhodes University in research on newspaper reporting of poverty reminds us that poverty is not an event but a process. By that he means that newspapers cover poverty as if it was an event – something that just happens – rather than a process – something that is achieved over a period of time. The Observer reports the two boys as an event, when in fact they are victims of a process over which they have no control.
Poverty in Swaziland is not natural. Despite what the Swaziland Prime Minister A T Dlamini likes to tell us, poverty is not an act of God and prayer is no solution.
The website, Rural Poverty in Swaziland, has this to say about why people in Swaziland are poor.
‘Poor economic growth, a rapidly expanding population and an increasingly uneven distribution of factors are factors that contribute to the growing number of Swaziland’s rural poor people. Other factors aggravating poverty are the rise in unemployment, the HIV/AIDS pandemic and the fact that large parts of the country
are vulnerable to drought and climate change. Environmental fragility is beginning to affect food security. Over grazing has caused soil depletion, while drought and periodic floods have become persistent problems.
Smallholder farmers living on Swazi Nation Land face a number of obstacles that prevent them from breaking out of poverty. The low agricultural productivity of the land can be attributed to a number of factors including difficult road access, poor linkages to markets, limited availability of irrigation water and vulnerability to climate change.'
Swazi journalist would do well to think about this when next they ‘report’ on poverty.
See also
POVERTY OF SWAZI JOURNALISM 2
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