For those who weren’t able to hear it before, here is a report from the BBC Radio 4 in the UK from the first day of the protests (12 April 2011).
It was broadcast at about 07.40 GMT, before the day really got under way. In the report Karen Allen, the BBC’s Southern Africa correspondent, says the people of Swaziland are protesting about the economic situation in the kingdom, corruption, the lack of democracy, human rights abuses and the lavish lifestyle of King Mswati III, sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch.
Swaziland, we are told, is ‘an island of dictatorship’ in the southern Africa region.
The presenter of the programme John Humphrys asks Allen whether what happens in Swaziland ‘matters to anybody, except for the poor souls who live there?’
The report was broadcast on the Today Programme – probably the most prestigious current affairs programme on radio in the UK.
For a further report from BBC Radio UK later in the day, see
BBC ON-THE-SPOT IN MANZINI
http://swazimedia.blogspot.com/2011/04/bbc-on-spot-in-manzini.html
There is an element of overkill in the British comment. Swaziland has a unique history and a different set of political dynamics. It is very simple to draw a picture of a vicious monarchy abusing its subjects. Nothing is far from the truth. It is the kind of news framing that the western media is able to digest and disseminate. Swaziland has a middle calss that has no democratic participatory role in the national politics. That is the starting point, but trying to resolve this impasse by painting a picture of dictatorial king has failed to capture the imagination of all Swazis. So swazis must go back the drawing board and resolve their issues.
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