Edgar Tsimane
28 November 2008
opinion
"News is the glue that binds free societies together," Allen H Neuharth, chairperson, The Freedom Forum, 1993.
This quotation could be helpful to President Ian Khama who steadfastly refuses to interact with the country's journalists, at least through press conferences. Khama has remained impervious to calls by the media for the presidency to become more accessible.
He has not addressed a single press conference since assuming the highest office in the land. The President appears to have adopted the view that "If it's far away, it's news, but if it's close at home, it's sociology." (James Reston - Wall Street Journal May 1963)
To what extent does Khama share the values of his fellow Batswana? To what level does his British kith and kin factor influence the way he rules? Related to this and not amusing is that as Khama struggles with his native language, Setswana, some Batswana submissively say "Khama kana ke lekgoanyana." Are we trapped in our self-imposed racial pigeonholes and prejudices?
During my short stint as a reporter on the Botswana Gazette in 2001, the newspaper's Managing Editor, Clara Olsen, asked me why Botswana should have several independent newspapers. My answer was "so that divergent views may be heard." Someone else had asked the same question before, albeit slightly differently. That person was Khama, then Vice President. According to Olsen, Khama had wondered why there was a proliferation of privately-owned newspapers when Batswana could do with the government-owned Daily News.
One would have expected that by now our President might have been advised on media issues. One such advise to Khama should have been that unlike soldiers, journalists ask questions - sometimes unpleasant questions - and that this is normal in democratic society. But it is becoming increasingly clear that "discipline" has taken precedence democracy; the type of "Discipline" with a capital "D" in military jargon that we civilians are not quite familiar with.
Journalism, being an empirical profession, dictates that we reporters look at information, events and incidents clinically. We do not make things happen; things happen. When Member of Parliament (MP) Botsalo Ntuane was forced to retract a statement in the press, which would have normally gone without much flourish in democratic traditions, this justifiably attracted media interest. The question was: "Is our democracy under threat?"
No sooner had the Ntuane matter died down than another MP Pono Moatlhodi received marching orders from candidacy in a constituency he was democratically chosen to represent by his fellow democrats during the ruling party's "Bulela di tswe".
As journalists, much of what we read and write is based on our Setswana values. When these values are violated, the transgression becomes news. When a politician or a civil servant engages in corrupt practices, the conduct is undesirable.
We are shattered and write accordingly when values such as is embodied in the expression "Mmua lebe o bua la gagwe" are transgressed, especially when that is done with reckless abandon and impunity.
The media continues to sound warning bells to the dangers of state regulation of the press, and before the unwanted Media Practitioners Bill can be signed into law, the media is vindicated by the Moatlhodi spectacle.
To that regard the conduct of the media over this matter as alarmist, we ask: Are the signs of an inclination towards the dictatorial not there for all to see? Professor Gene D. Lanier has observed that "intimidation and fear of controversy sadly sometimes result in the chill of self-censorship before the fact of imagined or anticipated public outrage".
The tragedy of the state that we are in now is that some among us appear to have elevated Khama to the status of "The Messiah" - the infallible one from the Khama dynasty! But we all know politicians and presidents are also liable to error. They also lie.
Out-going American President, George W Bush, for instance, lied to the world about "Weapons of Mass Destruction" being in Iraq while the former South African President Thabo Mbeki erred about the crisis in Zimbabwe.
One wonders when Dr Jeff Ramsay is going to arrange a press conference where the President will at last come face-to-face with the press. Is it not precisely why people like him hand the new-fangled Government Communications and Information Services exist? Is it not their primary duty to ensure the flow of information between Government and the governed? If so - and it is - what better way than by means of the Fourth Estate?
Last but not least: what is news to whites is not always news to blacks. Which bring us to the question: Does Khama have an ethno-centric worldview of news? His decision to visit to the US while other SADC leaders were meeting in South Africa over the 'Zimbabwe Ruins' and the intransigence of Robert Mugabe is difficult to put in perspective. Given his tough stance on Zimbabwe, many had expected Khama to go to South Africa and spell out how he proposed to deal with Mugabe and to rally support around the strategy.
Instead, Khama felt Conservation International's wildlife and weeds were more deserving of his presence than the influx of refugees from our neighbour to the north and all the tribulations associated with Zimbos in Botswana.
Those who had expected a press conference to explain why he had gaily attended to flora and fauna in far away America in preference to what everyone regarded as the more pressing issue of Zimbabwe in neighbouring South Africa were yet proven too optimistic.
But while the optimists still hold out the hope of press conferences at which to massage Khama's myriad gaffes, the media has used the Moatlhodi affair to take a more verite look at the man and put the President's authority to question viz. Robert Mugabe. And in this less romanticised view, both men share an alacrity to eradicate plurality.
May the powers remember Nelson Mandela's words (1993): "One has to accept that democracy cannot function without the media."
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