I suppose we should be grateful that journalists in Swaziland have at last woken up to the fact that Barnabas Dlamini, the kingdom’s illegally-appointed Prime Minister and Majozi Sithole, his hopeless Finance Minister, have been telling lies about the extent of the support they have from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for their plans to save the Swazi economy from meltdown.
The Times Sunday reports today (29 May 2011) that the ‘Letter of Comfort’ the IMF was alleged to have given the government to enable it to seek loans from international financial institutions was only a letter assessing what the government was trying to achieve in its so-called Fiscal Adjustment Roadmap for the economy.
Rather dramatically (as if to suggest that the newspaper has found out something nobody else knew) the newspaper reports it has the letter of assessment in its possession.
But the letter has been freely available on the Internet since mid-April 2011. The Times and other journalists in Swaziland had it available when the prime minister made his outlandish claims about support from the IMF. But these are Swazi journalists after all and instead of reporting the contents of the letter they chose instead simply to report unquestioned the statements by Dlamini and Sithole.
Readers of Swazi Media Commentary would however have known since early April 2011 that the government was lying about the support. And since journalists throughout Swaziland read this blog, it is a wonder why suddenly today – six weeks too late – they start to tell the Swazi people what’s really going on.
See also
DID SWAZI PM LIE ABOUT IMF SUPPORT?
http://swazimedia.blogspot.com/2011/05/did-swazi-pm-lie-about-imf-support.html
NOT MUCH COMFORT FROM IMF
http://swazimedia.blogspot.com/2011/05/not-much-comfort-from-imf.html
SWAZI PM MISLEADS ON IMF DECISION
http://swazimedia.blogspot.com/2011/04/swazi-pm-misleads-on-imf-decision.html
No comments:
Post a Comment