23 June 2009
editorial
Recently there has been a debate over President Ian Khama's retraction of his threat to take the Sunday Standard newspaper to court. In the build up to that incident, newspaper editors were engaged in re-establishing a working relationship with the Office of the President.
Proponents of this strategy were beginning to think that the relationship between the newspaper managers and the office of the President had been ruined. It would be impossible to discuss the merits and demerits of this position here, save that what appeared to the overriding objective, was the refurbishment of the soured relationship between OP and the newspaper managers. As the newspaper people discussed ways to repair this relationship, reports emerged that the president's sister, Jacqueline was also planning action against the newspaper. We believe that the president withdrew his action on principle, wanting to save himself, the nation and the country's highest office a messy legal wrangle.
We were also looking forward to a settling of the apparent dispute between the country's leaders and The Sunday Standard.We would like to believe that both parties have moved towards a position of mutual understanding.
While we agree that journalists should be prepared to face the consequences of their actions, we also believe that this should be done in a setting that respects democratic principles and the core values of the country's judicial system.The media complaints committee as established under the new Media Practitioners Act is a sham, to say the least. The committee is neither ethically nor professionally fit to judge journalists who walk the coals of reporting news on a daily basis. The journalists' fraternity is now convinced that the Media Practitioners Act will be used for exactly what we suspected, to clamp down on media independence. We believe that if the president is sincerely interested in a respectable conclusion to this debacle, he should advise his sister to find alternative avenues to have her concerns addressed. WE should avert all suspicion that the President may have acted in bad faith by withdrawing his initial action, only to prepare the way for yet another action by the family against The Sunday Standard.We must warn The Sunday Standard to keep its guards up, even if we would have preferred an amicable resolution to this unsavoury confrontation.
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Khama was afraid that if he filed suit against the Sunday Standard that he then would not be able to invoke immunity as President of the Republic regarding the unconstitutional way in which he was granted the Presidency. But Mmegi and other newspapers seem to be focused on the wrong issues here again. The issue isn't who submits a case or not and why, but the real issue is whether the sitting President can actually sit there under the consitution. Mmegi, Sunday Standard and others should being ding expose's on this issue. This is a fundamental constitutional issue that has direct effect on how Batswana are governed. But no one seems to be exploring this in any meaningflul way. This isn't about one person, it is about a flaw in the constitutional system.
It really sad that a top level newspaper like Mmegi doesn't know the difference between the word "advise" and "advice". The headline should read "Khama should advise Jacqueline to Stop"
One gives advice, but they advise others. If this was the first time I saw this in Mmegi I would think it was a typo, but they have done it so many times in the past that I think its because they don't know the difference.