For the media in Botswana, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Things have gone a full circle.
And it looks like we have reached the end of the road.
The media has tried under immensely difficult and confusing circumstances to show patience and pragmatism.
It has not paid off.
In fact it has come at a cost not least because the media has lacked an honest partner.
To be sure nobody knows where or how it will all end.
There is palpable anxiety across the media industry.
The general silence underscores the level of unease.
And it is all understandable.
When it all started a majority of journalists, from day one insisted on caution; never trust a politician, they warned.
Sadly, they have been proven right.
Promises made have been wantonly broken.
Relations are once again getting fraught and frosty.
The same set of journalists are once again warning that the government’s commitment to the media remains as ever suspect.
The media is not genuinely regarded as part of political agenda.
Differences between current government and the previous one are only cosmetic and self-serving, they say.
“We at least knew how to deal with Khama because he was openly hostile. This one [Masisi] is deceptive. He says one thing and does another,” a senior journalist told me not so long ago.
Even during the best of times, the media and those in power are never expected to be bedfellows.
But the distrust is clearly headed back to the Khama era days.
And with time that will once again prove toxic.
In fact there are already tell-tale signs of a deteriorating détente.
Government spin doctors think the media is ripe for picking, and this much is clear from their social media posts.
In the meantime the media are counting the costs.
Covid-19 has taken a heavy toll.
Journalists have died from the pandemic. Many have lost their jobs. Too many media houses are now technically insolvent.
With State of Emergency coming to an end, more journalists stand to be furloughed.
Individually journalists are fatigued and anxious.
For many of them the future is uncertain.
There is simply no how media houses, badly weakened long before advent of Covid-19 could keep up with the added burdens brought about by the pandemic.
There is not a single media house that is not going through cash crunch crisis today.
And for journalists this is deeply personal as it brings back with it sad memories from the recent past.
Long before the pandemic, some of the media businesses and journalists were already singled out and targeted by government.
They watch once again being plunged into an existential crisis. A heavy déjà vu overhang engulfs them.
Over time the media problems have become deeply structural and are thus by no means temporary or transitory.
There are too many issues to sort all at once.
Make no mistake, the media is today at its weakest it has been in recent memory.
It will take a long time to sort out the mess.
And few media houses will survive the pains and the medicine that need to be administered to save the ailing patient.
For Botswana Government, repealing the Media Practitioners Act has clearly not been a priority.
Given what the media has been told in several meetings with government, there is a deep-seated lack of respect for the media on the part of government.
Repealing the Act was only used as part of electoral rhetoric.
The journalists were themselves used as part of the general fodder.
In the last sitting of parliament, at least one piece of legislation was passed every other week. Sometimes two or even three in a week.
Yet there has been no hint of the Media Practitioners Act being repealed or a new one being enacted to replace it.
The media continues to live on hope based on vague and often unsubstantiated promises that are often thrown their way that the law is on its way.
In the meantime all instruments and the legal infrastructure that were available to former president Ian Khama to use against the media remain fully intact.
Any leader if they so wished can pick where Khama left.
The conditions under which the media works remain exactly the same.
The media remain at the mercy of those in power today.
Nothing, absolutely nothing has changed.
And this much we were reminded some days back when journalists trying to cover a public protest were treated by the police like they were part of unlawful protest themselves.
In fact the police accused the journalists of inviting protesters through their reports.
Here the Police Commissioner is wholly to blame.
The buck stops with him.
But the police are behaving the same way they always did because quite rightly, they know nothing has really changed.
The media is being asked to have blanket faith that there will never be such a leader again. Its crass!
The Office of the President likes to say they have appointed a Press Secretary to the President.
They use that as evidence of their lofty ambitions for the media.
This would be laughable were it not for the fact that it trivializes the media. And the less we talk about it the better for all of us.
The same laws that Khama used to attack the media are still active. And wholly appliacable.
So what gains have the media made? Zilch!
A few years back, Member of Parliament Dumelang Saleshando presented a private member’s Bill on Freedom of Information.
The law had the full backing of media advocacy group, MISA Botswana.
The ruling party at the time rejected the initiative on some of the flimsiest grounds.
They talked about flaws in drafting and that the law did not conform to the general drafting of Botswana Government laws. How absurd!
The Minister for Presidential Affairs at the time, Mokgweetsi Masisi promised to bring a proper law within a few months.
Almost a decade later, no such law has been brought before parliament.
And Mokgweetsi Masisi is now president of the republic, churning out even bigger promises.
With hindsight, the grounds on which this law was rejected, the promise that the then minister proffered and the disregard with which he dishonoured those promises really should have provided an early peek into what kind of president he would be.
Given what we now know, that law should have been accepted with all its flaws and imperfections.
And going forward those would have been fixed through amendments as and when.
But rejecting that law out of hand and promising to bring a better one a few months later has proved disingenuous as almost ten years later Botswana still does not have the Freedom of Information Act.
When Masisi won elections in 2019 one of his biggest cards was media freedom.
He was believable.
Sadly beyond the appointment of a Press Secretary he has not delivered a single one of his pledges on the structural fundamentals of the media in Botswana.
It is difficult to see how he can win back the media or win another election unless he repeals the Media Practitioners Act and replace it. But crucially he needs to come up with Freedom of Information Act.
