Journalists in Swaziland do not hold governments and powerful people to account.
Nor, do they ask questions that give people answers to why Swaziland is in crisis.
I wrote yesterday (Tuesday 6 May 2008) that journalists in Swaziland are not often reflective about the work they do. I wrote too soon, because there is an interesting article in this month’s Nation magazine (May 2008) on the very same subject.
Silekela Dlamini who correctly observes that Swaziland is faced with corruption and incompetent government goes on to say (also correctly) that journalists in Swaziland do not do enough to tell people why the kingdom is in such crisis.
Dlamini says that there are severe problems with the nation’s finances with illegal offshore banking of public funds; health and social welfare is in disarray with an underspending of its allocated budget coinciding while seriously ill Swazis are turned back by South African hospitals because bills have not been paid by the Swazi government.
Added to this, Dlamini writes, the new Swazi Constituion is being implemented ‘at a snail’s pace’ and the newly created Elections and Boundaries Commission ‘flouts every section of the very constitution that purportedly gave birth to it’.
What concerns Dlamini is that the media in Swaziland have failed to explain and analyse why these problems exist. They also allow Swazis to believe that Swaziland is a democracy when it is not.
‘While the media has always done commendably in exposing these anomalies, they have let us horribly down by failing to grind out answers from the public officials concerned,’ he writes.
‘Everybody knows something is not right in Swaziland. What everybody does not know is WHY this is so and WHY there are never any consequences for wrongdoing and sheer incompetence.
‘The role of the media is to dig for and provide the answers. Yet the media will not fulfil this mandate by adopting a gentle, pussycat approach toward complacent Tinkhundla [the system of government in Swaziland] functionaries. Corruption-riddled Tinkhundla demands robust journalism.’
Dlamini goes on to state that a vibrant and competent media play a major part in holding the powerful to account for their decisions and actions and giving voice to marginalised people in a kingdom where there is no formal political opposition to the ruling elite.
He adds, ‘What complicates this extra role is the challenge to still be seen to be maintaining a high level of objectivity. I often sense that our own journalists confuse objectivity with state friendly reporting, and this is where they lose the plot.’
Dlamini criticises the Swazi media for believing that Swaziland is a democratic nation. ‘What beats the imagination is how people for whom Tinkhundla is a daily classic case study of poor and dictatorial governance can actually be fooled this easily.’
Dlamini believes Swazi journalists are ‘abusing a proven potent peaceful weapon [journalism] for changing lives for the better. Haven’t we even had editors argue bizarrely that the king is no dictator because he has killed no one?’
He goes on, ‘Haven’t we heard the same calibre of editors claim spuriously that Swaziland is democratic because we have neither political prisoners nor exiles?’
Dlamini concludes, ‘Why should it be so difficult to work out that the king’s unopposed governance style is behind the laissez-faire public spending that has condemned more than 38 percent of the population to the HIV AIDS death row?
‘Let’s not forget that these are among the 70 percent who cannot feed themselves either, because of what the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has repeatedly described as a perilously skewed economy. Does the king first have to literally spear a subject to death to qualify as a killing dictator?’
Dlamini is right about the way that people in Swaziland who should know better are saying that things aren’t so bad. I have attended two meetings this past week, one organised by the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) Swaziland chapter and one forum for non-government organizations at which such sentiments were expressed.
Speakers believed that things were a bit better in Swaziland than they used to be and they’re not as bad as in some other countries (Zimbabwe often gets mentioned in this respect).
Such arguments miss the point. Swaziland is not a democracy. It becomes a democracy when people can elect and dismiss their government through an open ballot. It requires people to be able to join and to vote for political parties of their choice. It requires a separation of the political executive and the legislature and it needs a head of state that is not in control of the ‘defence’ forces and the police. When Swaziland has all of these things we can begin to think of it as a democracy.
A national election is due in Swaziland this year, let the media fulfil one of their roles (that of informing the public) about such things and let’s campaign for a proper democratic election.
See also
ROLE OF SWAZILAND’S JOURNALISTS
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