The editor of The Times of Swaziland’s Sunday edition was asked to resign this week after publishing an article about the king’s wife. Bheki Makhubu describes how he was axed
After having edited The Times of Swaziland’s Sunday edition for six years, it was rather a rude shock to realise just much the Swazi people fear change and are still prepared to live in an environment devoid of free speech and openness.
If anything, this last week has led me to realise that the country’s failure to democratise lies just as much with the people as it does with the authorities running the country.
This week I had to resign my position just as much due to political pressure as public disapproval of an article published on September 12, which gave a brief background of King Mswati’s new wife, Senteni Masango.
The story merely told that the 18-year- old was a high school drop-out who had been kicked out of two schools because of a lack of discipline. At the time King Mswati chose her as wife she had been dismissed from her last school.
Why did I publish the story? Because the natural reaction from anyone when the king chose her a week earlier at the annual Reed Dance ceremony was, who is she and where does she come from?
It was also a departure from the usual stories we run almost every week on corruption in the government and the lying that has become a norm among politicians here.
In the week after publication, during which the public stated its strong disapproval for having been informed about the young lady, an interesting scenario presented itself.
Last Saturday, the University of Swaziland held its graduation ceremony, where King Mswati, as chancellor, was invited to present certificates to the graduates.
Another of King Mswati’s wives, Inkhosikati LaMbikiza, arrived at the ceremony dressed in a graduation gown, having acquired a law degree from Unisa, early this year, and sat next to Senteni.
When I received the picture that evening while preparing the next day’s edition, I thought it was a stunning contrast: one a university graduate, the other a high school drop-out.
Not one famous for political correctness, I decided to run the picture on the front page under the caption “the graduate and the drop-out”. It was naturally the last straw.
The pressure mounted to a point where the newspaper owners had to be seen to be doing something about this matter or face the prospect of the whole establishment being shut down. So, I had to die, for a hundred to live.
As I pointed out earlier, the furore is instructive of what the people of Swaziland want. That there was political pressure on the newspaper was not surprising – it has existed under such conditions for many years now, being the only independent medium in the country.
However, when the public shows a strong disapproval of the article, citing invasion of the king’s privacy and a disrespect to the monarchy, it tells you that the people themselves are still comfortable living under a cloud of uncertainty and are willing to forego their right to know if it will make them sleep better at night.
For journalism, the whole issue is a disaster. The message it has sent to all journalists in Swaziland is that all news articles that could upset the powerful are to be spiked.
Forget the argument that this will be restricted to the monarchy – many politicians will take advantage of the media’s vulnerable position right now to advance their own agendas.
The move by the Media Institute of Southern Africa to throw its weight behind the government’s disapproval of the article has done untold damage to press freedom in Swaziland. As an international organisation, their accusation of The Times that running the story was unethical gave the politicians more justification that coming down on the newspaper was the right thing to do.
In the time I have edited the newspaper, I have gone out of my way to test the limits of press freedom in Swaziland. I suppose I have reached the limit. The only problem is that other journalists might not take advantage of the ground that has been covered and will see the latest developments as a sign that authority is a no-go area for the press.
Yet, time and again politicians in Swaziland have argued that there is enough freedom of the press in Swaziland and have, instead, accused the press of censoring itself in fear of the unknown.
The sad conclusion one has to come to after this debacle is that after having taken sufficient steps forward towards press freedom in the past 10 years, the press has regressed beyond where it started.
We have the sad reminder here that this is still good old Africa where journalists who don’t toe the line are put in their place. A shame, really.
@Victims demand to be paid
Evidence wa ka Ngobeni
Julia Molotsi’s only daughter, a Soweto student activist, was detained, assaulted, released, abducted and killed in 1990.
Molotsi shared her pain with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in Soweto in 1996. But today she believes appearing before the TRC did nothing for her dignity.
Molotsi says she has not received the compensation that was promised by the TRC, but her daughter’s killers received amnesty. “The people who killed my daughter are now free and are enjoying themselves with their families, and we victims are not taken care of,” says a bitter Molotsi.
This week she joined more than 200 people – most of them associated with the Khulumani Support Group, which helps victims of violence – in a protest march to force the TRC to pay compensation. The placard-carrying protesters held a sit-in inside the Johannesburg High Court.
Among the protesters was Sello Nhlapo (37) from Katlehong. He was shot in the chest during a demonstration in 1981, and lost a lung. Nhlapo testified at the TRC in 1996 where he asked for compensation.
Nhlapo, who lives in a shack with his wife and four children, said he needs the compensation to pay for his medical expenses and to support his family. Since he lost his lung he can no longer work a full day. His wife sells second-hand clothing, but does not generate a regular income.
An urgent interim reparation committee was set up last year after the publication of the TRC’s final report. According to committee chair Hlengiwe Mkhize hundreds of applicants have already received compensation of between R2 000 and R4 000.
Khulumani is demanding urgent intervention by the government, which they blame for stalling the reparation process. The organisation is concerned that when the TRC closes in December victims may not get their compensation, and that the interim compensation is not enough.
“We asked the former minister of justice to investigate this matter. But nothing has been done. Now we want someone who has taken over from Dullah Omar to meet with us to discuss this matter,” said Duma Kumalo of Khulumani. “We have sent several letters to the Department of Justice since 1997, but we have not even received any response from them. If they had answered our letters we would not be here.”
When a justice official asked whether the group had made an appointment, Kumalo said: “We thought it is not necessary for us to make any appointment because we have written several letters and no one bothered to respond. We are not leaving this place.”
However, the protesters dispersed after submitting a memorandum to the Department of Justice, giving it 10 days to respond to their problems and arrange a meeting with Minister of Justice Penuell Maduna.
@Life’s a dump, but it pays
An informal conservation industry is growing -at a rubbish dump in Dobsonville. Ann Eveleth reports
Annamarie Luvuno was a 24-year-old mother of two when she lost her job cooking at a Durban restaurant and left her “full-of- shit husband” behind in KwaMashu to seek greener pastures in Johannesburg.
But even in 1990 jobs were scarce in the City of Gold, and it wasn’t long before the relatives Luvuno stayed with in Tembisa began to complain that they already had too many mouths to feed.
A tip-off from a friend led Luvuno to the Marie-Louise rubbish dump in Dobsonville, where she has lived ever since, eking out a living from other people’s rubbish.
Luvuno lives with three other women from KwaZulu-Natal in one of a string of tiny camps that dot the border of the municipal dump. The 80-odd people living there are a small part of a growing informal conservation industry.
“We stay here from Monday to Friday and collect papers, plastic and tins from the dump when it closes. During the week I collect cans for recycling to pay for food. At the end of the month I take paper and plastic to a place in Crown Mines for about R700. I’m saving that to buy a house for my children,” says Luvuno, bending over to stuff more crumpled white paper into a one ton broadcloth bag “recycled” from a nearby sugar factory. One bag like this will fetch about R90, she says.
Luvuno spends the week in a metre-high zinc and plastic shack she built from materials salvaged from the dump. The bed, blankets, chairs, and even the kelim rug lining the floor were collected from the mountain of municipal waste.
“I am very happy doing this. We dust things with a powder to get rid of the smell, and on the weekends we go home. I stay with my sister in Zwaledi, next to [Chris Hani] Baragwanath hospital, and then come back on Monday. I don’t mind the dirt because I am making good money and there are no other jobs,” she adds.
Official estimates of the extent of the burgeoning waste collection trade are hard to come by, but paper giant Mondi told the Institute for Waste Management magazine Resource, that the tonnage of waste paper the company sources from the small business and hawker segments of the waste collection market alone had nearly trebled in the past five years, involving more than 5 000 people.
Mondi paid out more than R9-million last year to small business and hawker recyclers. Other private companies and municipalities also pay a small fortune to people collecting a range of different waste products for recycling.
Luvuno, now 33, says the money she is saving holds the promise of a better life for her children. “When I was in Durban, my husband used to drink and swear and fight with me. I went to hospital two times, and then I decided it was time to go.”
Luvuno left her children with her parents when she came to Johannesburg. She hopes she will soon be able to invite them to join her in a new home.
In the meantime, she maintains her culinary skills by cooking meals for the women in her camp with her neighbour Beauty Zondi, another former cook.
Zondi (48) left her home in Pietermaritzburg’s Gezebuso township and a job in a restaurant to follow her mother to Johannesburg. That was shortly after her husband died during the KwaZulu-Natal political violence and “just before [Nelson] Mandela was released”.
‘My mother came here to look for work and I decided to move with her. We didn’t know anybody in Johannesburg then, but we both found jobs cooking in a house for Mrs Rose in Roodepoort,” says Zondi.
“But then, before the [1994] election, my mother died and Mrs Rose said there was no more work. She said if I want to stay she would pay me R5 a day, or R10 a day. I still go there one day a month, and she pays me R50, but that’s not enough, so I came here.”
Zondi doesn’t know how much she earns in a month, but the R20 to R30 she gets from each bag of cans, together with the R50 or so she earns from collected paper every fortnight helps defray the costs of maintaining her weekend home in Dobsonville and keeping her four children, aged two, seven, 16 and 18 in school.
Doris Mthembu (55) came to the dump in 1994 when she lost her job as a gardener. Mthembu spends four days a week at the dump, and takes about R860 a month to her home in Roodepoort’s Matholeville township, where she lives with her five children and several grandchildren. She is the main breadwinner in the house.
It’s 4pm and the women can’t waste any more time talking. The dump is closing and the municipal officials who chase them away from the source of their earnings are going home soon.
It’s time to fold the empty bags under their arms, climb under the hole in the fence and head for the bulldozed mounds in search of more forgotten treasures.