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Thursday 20 March 2008

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

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