MYTH OF RICH SWAZI NURSES

Nurses in Swaziland who are packing their bags ready to travel to the UK for jobs paying as much as E1,800 (260 US dollars) per hour should hold on to their suitcases.

The Times of Swaziland under the headline Swazi nurses strike it rich in Britain reported yesterday (Tuesday 5 February 2008) that nurses from the kingdom were able to earn E14,400 (about 2,000 US dollars) for an eight hour day and about E288,000 (about 41,000 US dollars) for 20 days worked in a month. This, the Times reported, was 40 times more than local UK nurses were being paid.

It seems too good to be true doesn’t it? That’s because it is.

I smelt a rat when I saw that the news report was sourced from the UK’s biggest selling newspaper, The Sun. The Sun is a tabloid newspaper that only has a passing acquaintance with the truth.

The Times relied heavily on the Sun report which is available on the internet here.

The Sun distorted the figures for the salaries by making it look like one abnormal payment to one nurse was the typical payment for all nurses. The salaries were for nurses who did temporary hourly-paid work through employment agencies.

The news agency Press Association (PA) gave a fuller picture of nurses’ salaries. The PA reported that more typical salary for nurses was up to E465 (about 65 US dollars) per hour. A third of this salary would go to the agency employing the nurse.

The Times made it look as though these salaries were being earned by nurses from Swaziland, but nowhere in the original reports from the UK was Swaziland mentioned.

I guess the Times just assumed that if these salaries were on offer in the UK, then Swazi nurses would be able to get them. The Times could just as easily have said ‘Nigerian nurses strike it rich in Britain’.

Occasionally journalists in Swaziland pick up reports from news organizations abroad and print them in their own newspapers. There is nothing really wrong about this as long as the journalists give the source of their information. But journalists need to be more sceptical about the reports they read.

In the case of the nurses, the Times should have wondered why it was that agency nurses were being paid ‘40 times’ more than local UK nurses. A little bit of further investigation would have proved the original Sun report to be a huge exaggeration.

And what about these Swazi nurses? No news organisation in the UK said that Swazi nurses were getting these high salaries. We can’t even be sure that anyone from Swaziland is receiving the E465 an hour. That was a fabrication made up by the Times.

Let the Times prove me wrong and produce a Swazi nurse who has earned E288,000 for 20 days work.