Even at the best of times, President Lt gen Ian Khama’s relationship with the media has always been adversarial. These are the worst of times. Lately, the Khama administration has been caught out in a series of embarrassing scandals. First there were revelations of how the disaster relief fund money was diverted to the Directorate of Intelligence Services, then there was the BDC saga, then the Morupule B controversy and lately the Mosu air strip revelations and now reports that the party in government may have cooked up a petition they used to postpone the Francistown by-elections. The Khama administration has been a nonstop production line of excesses. One thing joins all these cases: the government’s reluctance to render an account to the citizenry. Its instinct has been to lash out at the inquisitive media.
In the face of an adversarial regime, the only saving grace for the media was a credible and independent judiciary and the legal principle that public bodies cannot bring an action for defamation as this would have an unwelcome “chilling” effect on the media and public criticism of governmental bodies. This legal safeguard is however under threat because the Khama administration has decided to circumvent it by sponsoring ministers and senior civil servants to sue media houses.
The decision to use public funds to silence government critics was made by the same cabinet and senior government officials who have been objects of embarrassing excesses and have been trying every trick in the book to insulate themselves against accounting to the public. There is definitely something wrong with a situation where officers who are paid by the public coming together and decide to use public funds to ensure that the public cannot hold them accountable.
The situation is not helped by the prevailing fear, whether real or imagined, that president Khama has packed the judiciary with his cronies thus compromising its independence. The last defence for a free press is an independent judiciary. Faced with an adversarial regime that sees nothing wrong with using public funds to silence criticism and a judiciary believed to be compromised, the Botswana media’s mandate to be the voice of the voiceless seems like mission impossible.
There are already fears that should Government, which has no shortage of funds, go ahead with plans to sponsor officials to sue media houses which do not have the same resources to defend themselves, journalists will be discouraged from criticizing and questioning government decisions.
Media houses facing libel law suits could end up paying hundreds of thousands of Pula in legal fees even if they win their cases and having less money means having a far smaller fighting chance against the rich government. Cases can go on for years, judgments can be appealed and the costs will skyrocket. Only the government, which has very deep pockets, can pursue such cases to the end. Thus, the defamation law may be used by the rich and powerful government to stifle criticisms of them
Litigation is a form of force, and the government must not silence its critics by force.
