BUGGING THE SWAZI CELL PHONES

I laughed like a drain when I read that MTN Swaziland, the kingdom’s only provider of cell phone services, claimed that it offered its customers ‘absolute privacy’ when they made calls.

Tebogo Mogapi, MTN chief executive went so far as to say, ‘Bugging of people’s phones is not happening on the MTN network and it is not possible for someone to bug a phone on our network.’

Sorry, but bugging a cell phone is comparatively easy and Mogapi must know that. If he doesn’t he shouldn’t be chief executive of a phone service provider. If, as I suspect, he does know this why is he trying to mislead his customers?

Part of the answer is found in the new Electronics Bill presently making its way through the Swaziland Parliament.

The bill would allow Swazi security services to tap phones if it can get a court order.

The Swazi Observer, the newspaper in effect owned by King Mswati III, sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch, was at pains to reassure readers their liberties were not under threat.

It quoted Mogapi saying MTN had ‘streamlined how the police can access information if they were investigating a serious matter’. However, he said MTN would allow police access, but only if they had a court order. So, not much of a protection there then.

The court order is irrelevant. In the modern age, you don’t need permission to bug someone’s cell phone; the technology is there for people to do it quite easily.

Mogapi, who remember is chief executive of MTN, doesn’t seem to have heard about this. He told the Observer, ‘We understand that there’s software available that could go into your number and duplicate messages, but it hasn’t been demonstrated to me yet.’

Where has he been hiding? There are numerous accounts of cell phone tapping from across the world. In 2007 a UK newspaper journalist Clive Goodman made international news when he was jailed for reporting the private phone calls of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles.

Although it is illegal in most countries it is easy to tap a cell phone. If you feel the need to listen in on the conversations of King Mswati or Barnabas Dlamini, his illegally-appointed prime minister, or anyone else for that matter, you can get the necessary software here, or here or here.

If you think your own phone is bugged, here’s how to find out.

EX-SWAZILAND PM’s E1m CARS MYSTERY

How the former Prime Minister of Swaziland Themba Dlamini came to buy two cars worth E1 million (145,000 US dollars) remains a mystery.

The Times Sunday published pictures of Dlamini’s cars, including a Mercedes Benz S 350, and wanted to question the former prime minister about where the money came from to buy them .

Dlamini refused to answer questions and instead complained to the Weekend Observer newspaper which reported his views on Saturday (3 January 2009).

Dlamini who left the PM’s office in September 2008 is now managing director of the company that owns the Weekend Observer and its stablemate publication, the Swazi Observer. The company is in effect owned by King Mswati III.

Dlamini cried ‘foul’ and said that the Times Sunday had invaded his privacy and had put his life in danger by publishing the photo.

The editor of the Times Sunday responded by saying that the car was clearly visible from the street and no intrusion into Dlamini’s property had taken place in order to take photographs.

Dlamini and the Weekend Observer have tried to make the incident into a matter of journalistic ethics, claiming that Dlamini’s privacy was invaded.

This doesn’t seem to be the case. If the Times Sunday photographer could see the car from the street there was no invasion of privacy. As for the ‘terrorism’ fear, even the most dim-witted terrorist would also be able to see the car. Perhaps the Times Sunday has done Dlamini a favour by alerting him to the fact that he needs better security.

What remains unanswered is how could Dlamini afford the cars? The Times Sunday in an editorial (4 January 2009) said, ‘Certainly we are entitled to know this, because this man spent five years as our prime minister, and therefore enjoyed a salary paid for by us, the taxpayers. As far as we are concerned, he is still being well looked after by the government, and therefore everything he does we must know.’

I am reminded of another car scandal from February 2005. On that occasion King Mswati III banned newspapers from publishing pictures of his car after the king was criticised both inside Swaziland and in the wider international community for wasting money on expensive luxuries, while 70 percent of his subjects lived in abject poverty, earning less than one US dollar a day, and many of them relied on international food aid to stop from starving

We can only assume that Themba Dlamini feels he has something to hide by not talking about his cars. I doubt that his silence is because he feels a deep sense of shame.

PASTOR AND THE PRYING SWAZI PRESS

This is the story of the pastor, the widow and the prying Swazi Press.

The pastor and the widow snuggled down for a kiss and a cuddle under a wattle tree near the Spar supermarket in Mbabane, Swaziland’s capital city.

Then two men, looking for shade to eat their lunch, spotted the couple. They recognised the man as a pastor from their church.

The next thing we know reporters and a photographer from the Swazi Observer arrived on the scene and the next day (Wednesday 6 February 2008) a photograph of the pastor and the widow appeared on the newspaper’s front page along with the headline PASTOR CAUGHT HAVING SEX WITH WIDOW.

If that wasn’t enough the Observer published another ten photos – yes, you read that right, ten photos – on an inside page of the couple and also a news report alerting Observer readers to just how shocking this behaviour was.

Here’s some of what the Observer had to say:

‘On arrival, reporters found the pastor fondling, caressing and kissing the widow as they moved a step further.

‘When our photographer arrived at the scene, several metres from Spar parking, the couple was in deep pleasure.’

Well, I suppose it depends what you mean by ‘deep pleasure.’ They were kissing but they were not having sex. The eleven photographs show both the pastor and the widow fully clothed. So the Observer headline was not accurate. Sensational yes: accurate, no.

The couple were not named but they could be clearly identified from the photographs, even though the newspaper did block out their eyes.

The story took a new twist on Friday (8 February 2008) when the Observer again published a picture of the couple on its front page along with a report on an inside page that the League of Swaziland Churches was investigating the ‘randy pastor’.

The League’s president told the Observer, ‘We are even tempted to believe that this man is not a Christian because Christians do not engage in such practices.’ You learn something new every day: Christians do not have sex.

The story of the pastor and the widow has appeared on the Observer’s website and people across the world have picked it up and are having a good laugh about it. (See the blogsite Of Course, I could Be Wrong as an example.)

In journalism they say that sex always sells newspapers. Add to that a bit of religion and you have a perfect recipe for a circulation builder.

But there is a serious question that needs to be answered: has the Observer violated the rights to privacy of the pastor and the widow?

There are no hard and fast rules about exactly what constitutes an invasion of privacy. It depends to a large extent on who is involved and where people are at the time

Swazi journalists have some help here. Article 5 of the Swaziland National Association of Journalists (SNAJ) Code of Conduct states that journalists should respect privacy and human dignity. The code goes onto say that intrusions into a person’s private life can only be justified when done in the public interest.

The SNAJ code seems quite clear, but trying to apply it to the pastor and the widow is less so.

Most people would probably agree that two people kissing and cuddling together is a private act and their actions should not be photographed and published in a newspaper. But is it still a ‘private act’ if the couple are cuddling under a tree close to a supermarket car park? They probably couldn’t have reasonably expected to remain unseen. So in this case the couple were not in a private place.

But even if the couple were in a public place and seen cuddling by people passing by, was the Observer right to publish eleven photographs, including one on the front page? The answer to that question is less simple.

The SNAJ code allows for a person’s privacy to be breached ‘in the public interest’. We need to be careful how we define ‘public interest’. We should not confuse it with something that is ‘interesting to the public’. I have no doubt that the exploits of the pastor and the widow are interesting to the public. The way the story is being shared on the Internet shows this to be true. But the cuddling couple are the subject of gossip. People are having a bit of a laugh at their expense and that is all. Newspapers shouldn’t be gossip sheets; they need to be held to higher standards.

So is the story in the ‘public interest’? The Press Complaints Commission in the UK defines matters ‘as being in the public interest if they are a matter of i) detecting or exposing crime or a serious misdemeanour ii) protecting public health and safety iii) preventing the public from being misled by some statement or action of an individual or organization.’

The Observer report about the pastor and the widow is not exposing crime, nor is it protecting public health or safety.

Some people may argue, however, that the Observer is preventing the public from being misled by the action of an individual.

The pastor is to an extent a public figure because people who attend his church know him and as a pastor he is also a man of God. People might reasonably expect the pastor to have a higher standard than the rest of us when it comes to kissing and cuddling in public. In that case, the Observer might have a case for saying that it is exposing the pastor as dishonest.

In Swaziland the newspapers often expose pastors for the unacceptable ways they behave. Usually, however, pastors are exposed for criminal activity, such as rape or paedophilia (having sex with children). It is not clear whether the ‘randy pastor’ in the Observer report has committed an offence. There probably are laws about ‘having sex’ in public, but that isn’t what the pastor and the widow were up to. Anyway, I have seen no media reports that the pastor has been charged with committing a crime.

But the Observer report doesn’t attempt to ‘expose’ the pastor for wrongdoing. The report just details the circumstances in which the pastor and the widow were discovered and the pastor’s reaction when he noticed he was being photographed.

So this doesn’t look to me like a report in the ‘public interest’.

So to recap, a man who is a little bit famous had a kiss and a cuddle with a widow who is not famous at all. They had their cuddle in a public place and a nosey photographer took photographs and the next day a newspaper published 11 of them for everyone to see.

The Observer has breached the right to privacy of the couple because of the way it handled its report. It seems to me that the Observer set out to humiliate the pastor in the way the journalist wrote the report and the way the editor published it, first by putting a picture on the front page, then by publishing a report on page three and then by putting ten photographs on page nine.

The treatment of the story was overkill. The pictures were meant to titillate readers over a bit of hanky panky by a ‘randy pastor’. Nowhere in the coverage did the Observer attempt to show that the pastor’s behaviour was inappropriate for a man of the church and therefore it wasn’t really concerned about the ‘public interest’ and only in a story that might be ‘interesting to the public’.

See also
SWAZI MORALISTS ATTACK WIDOW

SWAZI MORALISTS ATTACK WIDOW

There is an interesting postscript to the report about the Swazi pastor and the widow who were caught by a newspaper ‘having sex’ under a wattle tree.

I wrote earlier about how the Swazi Observer invaded the privacy of the couple who were having a kiss and a cuddle in the shade. Despite the Observer’s accusation that they were ‘having sex’ they were in fact fully clothed throughout the whole incident.

Now, predictably the Observer has alerted the moral brigade to condemn the couple. In so doing the Observer has unintentionally given readers an insight to Swazi culture (at its worse).

First up to the mat in the Observer yesterday (Monday 11 February 2008) was someone described by the Observer as a ‘famous custodian and commentator on cultural values,’ Lindzeni Ndlangamandla.

Ndlangamandla ‘teaches Swazi values’ (the Observer’s words, not mine) on the government controlled radio station SBIS, Typically, for a ‘traditionalist’ she condemned the woman. The Observer reported her saying the widow should not have accepted the mourning gowns if she was not certain about her behaviour.

She went on, ‘to the best of my knowledge, a widow is not supposed to fall in love, nor look at a man in the eyes. She is not even expected to hold hands with a man’.

In traditional Swazi custom women have no rights of their own. They are treated as minors and effectively ‘owned’ by their men (usually their husbands or fathers). It would seem that even when their man has passed on a woman has no right to a life.

The second moraliser brought forward by the Observer was Swaziland Action Group Against Abuse (SWAGAA) National Director Nonhlanhla Dlamini.

The Observer reported her saying, ‘It shows that we have lost values as a nation because a widow is expected to respect herself. In this era of HIV and AIDS pandemic, it is worrying for such adults to be seen behaving in such a manner.’

This is a worrying statement from a leader of SWAGAA. Somebody ought to explain to her that you don’t get HIV from kissing.

In its report the Observer also repeated comments from the pastor’s church regarding the ‘unChristian-like’ behaviour he had indulged in. His church, it seems, is hell-bent on disciplining him.

There was one less extreme voice. A pastor at the Kingdom Church in Manzini said that thing about casting the first stone.

Good point pastor. I wonder how many journalists have had a bit of a kiss and a cuddle that they then went on to regret?

See also
PASTOR AND THE PRYING SWAZI PRESS

SISTERS DO IT ON THEIR OWN

Recently I commented about how the Times Sunday denigrated women and encouraged sexual harassment in the workplace.

A reader has pointed out that this kind of attitude to women is nothing new in the Swazi press. Each week there are ‘pin up’ photographs of women wearing next to no clothes (The Weekend Observer and Swazi News are the main offenders here).

Then there are the items in the Times Sunday ‘Style’ section which report on dance clubs and such like which make young women look like empty heads who have nothing on their minds but sex.

There was a particularly nasty example of this a few months ago. The Times Sunday (31 December 2006) had a front page picture of two young women with their arms around each others neck and appearing to kiss one another with the headline ‘It’s not in our constitution, but … Sisters do it on their own’. There was then a ‘taster’ headline directing readers to a further four pictures on page 3, which included the two women on a crowded dance floor of a nightclub in Pigg’s Peak.

The four pictures were similar to one another and they show the women engaged in what the newspaper terms ‘French kissing’.

One picture caption sums up the paper’s mood, ‘They just could not resist each other and revellers did not bother them while at it.’

Not only were the pictures unethical because they treated the women as sex objects to titillate men, but they also invaded the privacy of two totally innocent young women who were in a public place enjoying themselves. The newspapers, against the Swaziland National Association of Journalists’ own Code of Ethics, violated their privacy. Article five states quite clearly that journalists should respect the right of the individual’s privacy and human dignity.

A report that accompanies the pictures further intrudes into the women’s privacy. We are told the women were seemingly together with a couple of boyfriends whom they were regularly seen dancing with and even had a meal together. The report then recounts that the two women got on the dance floor and started and continued kissing ‘with French kissing that could easily make it into the Guinness World Book of Records as the longest same sex kiss inside a packed club.’

Revellers went on to enjoy the show while the two remained stuck on each others’ lips.

No attempt was made by the photographer to talk to the women and there is no obvious reason why this is a news story worthy of the front page except that it is titillating to male readers.

This is nothing new in the media where women's bodies are used to attract the attention of men and to sell products. The pictures and accompanying story in the Times Sunday show two women being offered to the reader as objects to be leered over.

The problem is that we have become so used to seeing women treated in this way that it is considered ‘normal’. How can we be surprised by this in a kingdom in which the Miss Swaziland beauty contest is seen as an important cultural event?

Generally, the media use women’s bodies to try to make profit. The assumption is that having pictures of sexually attractive women sells newspapers. Advertisers also use images of ‘attractive’ women to sell their products.

They may be on the wrong track, however. The Gender and Media Audience Study, published by Gender Links, which surveyed people in Swaziland about what they liked in the news, found that the vast majority of both men and women interviewed said they find sexual images of women in the news either ‘uncomfortable’ or ‘insulting’. Only a tiny proportion of women and men said they are encouraged to buy the newspaper or watch the news as a result of such images.

As the study states, ‘The gap between media decision makers and consumers should be pause for thought.’

SNAJ CODE OF CONDUCT

This Blog will comment on the Swaziland News Media with a particular emphasis on the ethical standards of the kingdom’s journalism. The best way to do this is to use the standards journalists in Swaziland set for themselves and to study how well they adhere to these.

The majority of Swazi journalists and other media practitioners are organised in professionals associations such as The Swaziland National Association of Journalists (SNAJ), which has a membership of 150 out of the estimated 200 journalists who are working in the country.

SNAJ itself has published a code of conduct and this provides a framework of reference to all practicing journalists in Swaziland, both full-time and freelance. The code is meant to ensure that members adhere to the highest ethical standards, professional competence and good behaviour in carrying out their duties. Its overriding concern is that members of the media should conduct themselves with a high sense of responsibility without infringing the rights of individuals and society in general.

The Code is divided into 19 Articles, an edited version of which follows:

Art 1: Peoples right to information (The duty of every journalist is to write and report, adhere to and faithfully defend, the truth. A journalist should make adequate inquiries, do cross-checking of facts in order to provide the public with unbiased, accurate, balanced and comprehensive information. The public must have unfettered access to all media).

Art 2: Social responsibility (Including a journalist may advise a survivor of a sexual offence to go for counselling).

Art 3: Professional integrity and conflict of interest (Journalists should not accept bribes and there should be no conflict of interest in the carrying out of the journalists’ duties.

Art 4: Plagiarism is unethical and illegal.

Art 5: Respect for privacy and human dignity (Journalists should respect the right of the individual, privacy and human dignity. Enquiries and intrusions into a person’s private life can only be justified when done in the public interest. A journalist should guard against defamation, libel, slander and obscenity. A journalist shall seek consent of the survivor before taking pictures or conducting interviews with survivors of sexual offences. In cases of minors, the consent of their guardians shall be sufficient. Evidence of the consent may be recorded electronically or documentary.)

Art 6: Respect for national and ethnic values (A journalist shall not originate material which encourages discrimination on the grounds of ethnicity, colour, creed, gender or sexual orientation. Journalists should respect ethnic values of Swazi society unless they compromise good moral values or violate human rights.).

Art 7: Confidential sources (Journalists are bound to protect confidential sources of information).

Art 8: Suppression of news (Under no circumstances should news or a publication be suppressed unless it borders on issues of national security).

Art 9: Corrections (Whenever there is an inaccurate or misleading report it should be corrected promptly and given due prominence. An apology should be published whenever appropriate).

Art 10: Rejoinders (A fair opportunity to respond to issues should be given to individuals and organizations).

Art11: Information and pictures (A journalist shall obtain information, photographs and illustrations only by ethical means provided the use of other means can be justified).

Art 12: Separating comment from facts (While free to take positions on any issue, journalists shall draw a clear line between comment, conjecture and fact).

Art 13: Hate speech. (Journalists shall avoid by all means the publication of speech that might promote hatred, spite and conflict amongst the Swazi or any other nation.)

Art 14: Respect embargoes when they exist on stories.

Art 15: Survivors of sexual assault (Journalists shall avoid identifying survivors of sexual assault or any information that may lead to the identification of the survivor.

Art 16: Dealing with minors (Journalists shall protect the rights of minors and in criminal and other cases secure the consent of parents or guardians before interviewing or photographing them).

Art 17: Personal grief and distress (Journalists should exercise tact and sensitivity in seeking information and publication).

Art 18: News headlines and sensationalism (Newspaper headlines shall be fully warranted by contents of the articles they announce. Photographs shall give an accurate picture of an event not highlight an incident out of context. Journalists shall endeavour to avoid reporting on information that will result in secondary trauma.)

Art 19: HIV AIDS. There are ten sub sections to this article covering areas including the right to confidentiality and privacy; informed consent and the rights of children infected with HIV.