Listeners to Swaziland’s state radio heard ”live” reports from war correspondent Phesheya Dube, purportedly from Iraq, but then saw him walking around Mbabane.
During Dube’s ”mission”, radio presenter Moses Mthetho Matsebula asked listeners to pray for Dube, the acting head of programmes for the Swaziland Broadcasting and Information Services.
”Fellow countrymen, it looks like our correspondent in a Baghdad cave has been bombed and I have been trying to locate him to no avail and I am asking for your prayers so that you cannot lose such a good reporter,” Matsebula said.
On Thursday last week — a week after the Iraq war started — Dube went to parliament, where curious MPs asked him when he had returned from the Iraqi capital.
He reportedly admitted that he had been monitoring television reports on the Iraq war, then interpreting them for Swazis without TV sets.
MP Jojo Dlamini, from Mayiwane, in northern Swaziland, asked Information Minister Mntonzima Dlamini in parliament: ”Mr Minister, can you explain to this house why the Swaziland Broadcasting and Information Services is allowed to mislead the public that Phesheya was reporting live from Baghdad when he was reporting from his house?”
Dlamini promised to respond on Thursday. – Sapa-AFP