HONOUR FOR SWAZI RIGHTS LAWYER

A second Swaziland human rights activist has won an international award.

Thuli Makama, a lawyer, has been working for the rights of people in Swaziland not to be shot if they are seen to be breaking the law.

In particular, Makama has been working with poachers who are being shot at (and at least 20 have been killed or maimed) by game rangers, who have the approval of King Mswati III.

Makama, who is head of the Swazi environmental group Yonge Nawe, has won a prestigious award called the Goldman Environmental Prize for her work.

In September 2008 I reported on a campaign for justice for Swazi man Musa Gamedz who was hunted down and executed in broad daylight because he was suspected of poaching on Big Game Parks.

A documentary by Journeyman Pictures Journeyman Pictures called Killing the Poachers revealed that King Mswati III, sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch, had given a royal warrant that allowed a chief ranger to shoot and if necessary kill people suspected of poaching. Under the Royal Warrant, the killer would not be prosecuted as long as he could show that the poacher was armed and drew a weapon first.

The award for Makama has attracted international attention to the lack of human rights in Swaziland. She told the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), suspected poachers should be arrested and ‘taken through the due process of law’.

‘There are many illegal acts that should not mean you are tried, sentenced and executed at the scene.’

Makama is the second Swazi human rights activist to receive an international award in recent weeks. Last month (March 2010), Mario Masuku, president of the People’s United Democratic Movement (PUDEMO), received the Swaziland Democracy Watch (SWADEWA) Democracy Prize 2010, from a group in Denmark.

MORE SWAZI COLD-BLOODED KILLING

First it was trigger happy soldiers who killed civilians in cold blood and then it was the police force, now it’s the turn of security guards.

News comes that an alleged poacher Sicelo Mamba was shot 12 times by security guards after he was found hunting impala outside of a farm.

Now relatives want to know what happened. They are asking why the guards had to release 12 rounds of ammunition and are alleging that the guards where aiming to kill Sicelo.

According to a report in the Times of Swaziland, the only independent daily in the kingdom, Mamba’s sister Boshiwe Mamba said she later saw his body with bullet wounds in his head, back and one through the buttocks which seemed to have burst his bladder.

‘There is a lot of mystery surrounding his death and it looks like these people knew exactly who Sicelo was,’ she told the Times.

She added that the bandages all over his body made it difficult to see the other wounds.

According to Sanele Vilakati who had accompanied Sicelo Mamba on 3 January 2010, the two had gone hunting and that they killed two impalas.

‘He left when we had just killed the animals and we were to meet at home,’ Vilakati told the Times.

He said a few minutes later just after 7pm he heard guns shots and Sicelo was screaming like someone in pain.

Vilakati said that five more shots were fired at the crying Sicelo and then there was silence.

He said although the family believe that Sicelo was shot by farm guards, he believes he was shot by guards who look after cattle but carry R5 rifles.

The Times did not give the name of the farm where the killing took place because police are still investigating, although the newspaper failed to explain how revealing this information would hamper the police.

I don’t know where the incident took place, but I do know there has been a history of attacks by security guards in rural Swaziland.

As I wrote in 2008, a young Swazi man, Musa Gamedze, was hunted down and executed in broad daylight at his home, in full view of his children. According to eyewitness reports the man who fired the fatal shot was the General Manager of a local private game reserve, Mkhaya, accompanied by three police officers.

Friends of the Earth (FoE) reported at the time that Big Game Parks (BGP) owns and manages Mlilwane Wildlife Sanctuary and Mkhaya Nature Reserve. It also manages Hlane National Park, the country’s largest protected area, held in trust for the Nation by King Mswati III, sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch.

In 2005 Friends of the Earth Swaziland published a research report into the conflicts arising from the management of protected areas. It exposed numerous cases of human rights abuses which were alleged to have been committed in the name of conservation by game rangers and put forward various recommendations. These include the urgent repeal of section 23 of the Game Act, used by perpetrators of these human rights abuses to avoid prosecution.

SWAZI COPS LET MAN BE EXECUTED

On 8 August 2008 a young Swazi man, Musa Gamedze, was hunted down and executed in broad daylight at his home, in full view of his children. According to eyewitness reports the man who fired the fatal shot was the General Manager of a local private game reserve, Mkhaya, accompanied by three police officers.

Friends of the Earth (FoE) reports that Big Game Parks (BGP) owns and manages Mlilwane Wildlife Sanctuary and Mkhaya Nature Reserve. It also manages Hlane National Park, the country’s largest protected area, held in trust for the Nation by the King.

Musa Gamedze was part of a community that was forcibly evicted, without compensation, by BGP from land they had lived on for more than four decades. The community is still resettling and struggling to rebuild their livelihoods. Their new home is over 10km away from Mkhaya Game Reserve and the time of the shooting Musa had just returned to visit his three young children.

Musa is not the only one to suffer at the hands of BGP. Many others have been killed or left crippled in suspicious circumstances. The police and the parks rangers, when not denying responsibility, cite poaching as the reason for the attacks.

Whilst there have been reports of game poaching by the residents of the neighbouring communities, these are understood to be mainly subsistence in nature with some resulting from farmers defending their crops against marauding game from the nature reserves.

In 2005 Friends of the Earth Swaziland published a research report into the conflicts arising from the management of protected areas. It exposed numerous cases of human rights abuses which were alleged to have been committed in the name of conservation by game rangers and put forward various recommendations. These include the urgent repeal of section 23 of the Game Act, used by perpetrators of these human rights abuses to avoid prosecution.

Three years after this report the situation is critical.

For more information click here.

See also

DEFEND SWAZILAND’S RURAL PEOPLE

DEFEND SWAZILAND'S RURAL PEOPLE

Hundreds of campaigners recently called on the Prime Minister of Swaziland to uphold the rights of local communities evicted from their land and intimidated in the name of conservation.

On 8 August 2008 a young Swazi man, Musa Gamedze, was hunted down and executed in broad daylight at his home.

In early September Friends of the Earth (FoE) created a cyberaction calling on the Prime Minister of Swaziland and other powerful figures in Swaziland to arrest the killers of Gamedze and give access to justice for all other victims of abuse, torture and killings undertaken by the company Big Game Parks in the name of conservation.

So many people took part in action that the government shut down the email addresses FoE was using

FoE Swaziland will soon be handing over the names of everyone who took part in action, in the form of a petition, and demanding a response from the Prime Minister.

For more information and to join the protest click here.

See also
SWAZI COPS LET MAN BE EXECUTED

LET’S LOOK AT RURAL SWAZILAND

Swazi journalists should get out of their offices more.

Because when they do they are able to come up with vivid articles about what it is really like to live in Swaziland.

I was reminded of this last Saturday (15 March 2007) by an article in the Swazi News about life at a rural school in Nyakatfo.

The reporter seemed so genuinely shocked by the conditions at the Nazarene primary school the article read as if it was about another country – or even another planet.

‘The school is a sorry sight, it looks like a building you would to find in one of the war torn regions of Africa, yet it is in a country that claimed its independence 40 years ago,’ the report says.

The Swazi News also published photographs of the school, including classrooms without roofs and doors and a class where children are sitting on the cold floor because there is no furniture for them.

‘A new block of three classrooms, which is incomplete, is being used, but it is a health hazard. The floors have no concrete, there are no doors, no furniture, no windows and the pupils are still being exposed to the elements’, the Swazi News reports.

All this the newspaper describes as a ‘disgrace’.

The school principal blames it all on poverty because parents are not able to pay school fees.

The Swazi News is not so convinced. It contrasts the poverty of the school with the expenditure on furniture at the Ministry of Education in Mbabane.

Oddly, the headline to the article, LOOK AT THIS AND TELL US DO WE NEED 40/40 PARTY? is a clear reference to a decision to hold a joint celebration later this year to mark both the 40th birthday of King Mswati III and the 40th anniversary of Swaziland’s independence from colonial rule.

The celebrations are expected to run into the tens of millions of emalangengi (maybe 2-3 million US dollars), but nowhere in the article is this celebration mentioned. Nonetheless the newspaper has clearly planted a seed of doubt into the minds of readers that the money to be spent on the celebration could be better used elsewhere.

I was pleased to see this article in the Swazi News because too much space in the newspapers in Swaziland is given over to things that happen in urban areas, even though about 77 per cent of the Swaziland population of nearly one million people lives in rural areas.

Neither of the kingdom’s two daily newspapers, the Times of Swaziland and the Swazi Observer, make much effort to cover rural areas. The reasons for this are mainly that people in rural areas are mostly too poor to be attractive to advertisers in the papers and the cost of taking the newspapers to remote areas is not economically viable.

A result of this is that too often the newspapers ignore what is going on in the rural areas.

Even though both the daily newspapers pages each week of what they call ‘community news’ this often also ignores rural people. Monday's community news in the Times, (17 March 2008) for example, had three stories: two were about organizations giving donations and the third was a report about students from Northern Ireland in Europe who would be visiting Swaziland in July.

None of these stories really reflect what is going on in the rural areas. Swazi journalists must embrace the village because most of the important stories are taking place outside of the urban areas and are missed by journalists because they have a narrow definition of interest.

Swazi journalism should reflect the concerns and activities of the society it serves and it should mirror society as a whole. The vast majority of Swaziland’s people live in rural areas and because such a large proportion of the population live in rural areas they are likely to be where trends and events that will have major impact on urban areas later on. Rural areas are where environmental changes are first felt. Also, that is where there are social changes are happening, for example with such as land use, people having to abandon the rural areas for towns and such like.

Both the daily papers claim to be national papers. The Observer slogan is ‘We serve the nation.’ The Times calls itself the ‘national newspaper of Swaziland since 1897.’

One of the purposes of the news media is to tell people what is going on in their own country. Unfortunately, the Swazi newspapers tend to mostly tell us what is going on in the towns and because of this they cannot genuinely call themselves ‘national’.

See also
REACH THE GRASSROOTS
A VOICE FOR THE VOICELESS

POVERTY OF SWAZI JOURNALISM 2

The reporting last week by the Swazi Observer of two destitute seven-year-old boys has awoken concerns about how the media in Swaziland report on poverty.

I wrote yesterday that the media tend to cover ‘poverty’ as if it were an event, when, in fact, it is a process.

The reports about the two boys showed that they were without parents, often went days without meals, had to walk 10 kilometres a day to school and only had rags to wear.

The coverage sparked concern among readers of the newspaper and donations of food, clothes and cash flooded in. I was critical of the Observer because 70 per cent of the population of Swaziland or about 700,000 people live on less than one US dollar a day. That pittance of an income means most people in Swaziland go hungry most of the time. About 66 per cent of the population is unable to meet basic food needs, while 43 per cent live in chronic poverty. Or put another way, the two boys featured in the Observer last week are not really much different from anyone else.

I do not intend to single out the Observer for particular criticism. Research by Sibusiso Ngubane into how the Times of Swaziland covers poverty shows that the Observer is far from being alone.

In his research Ngubane wanted to know whether the Times played an important role in fighting poverty in Swaziland.

He defined poverty as ‘a state of being deprived of the essentials of well-being such as adequate housing, food, sufficient income, employment, access to required social services and social status.’

He looked at 20 copies of the Times spread over the entire year, 2006, and found that only 24 stories about poverty were published in his sample. This led him to conclude that the Times ‘hardly reports about poverty in the country.’ He said the Times only reported about poverty as an event.

He said, ‘… the Times mostly reports about poverty when a Member of Parliament or International Donor donates food and clothes to the poor as compared to reporting about the state of poverty in rural areas of Swaziland.’

He added that the Times hardly wrote about the background of the poor while reporting about them. ‘The voice of the poor is not included when reporting about poverty’ he said. ‘The Times does not dig deep in the stories of poverty, they only report what they are told, not what they know.’

‘They also don’t go to the communities to get the stories first hand and interview the poor.’

Ngubane, a Journalism and Mass Communication student at the University of Swaziland, found that the Times did not focus on individuals but instead focused on communities in the rural areas that live in severe poverty. However, there were occasions when the Times gave some background to the causes of poverty (for example, orphans created by the HIV AIDS pandemic).

Ngubane concluded that the Times did not ‘attach any importance to the issue of poverty in the country.’ One piece of evidence for this was the fact that the newspaper did not give prominence to poverty stories. ‘.. there was not even a single story on poverty in the first five pages, including the front page.’ Most of the stories appeared on the ‘community news’ page.

None of the stories that the Times did publish on poverty were followed up at a later date, leading Ngubane to conclude that the Times did not dig deeply into poverty to find out ‘what led the poor to find themselves in such an unfortunate situation.’

There is some hope in the reporting of poverty, however. Comparing the Times to the electronic media in Swaziland, Ngubane suggests that television and radio do a better job when covering poverty. He writes that from his own observation a television or radio bulletin ‘always has one or more stories about poverty every day’.



See also

POVERTY OF SWAZI JOURNALISM 1