So much potential that would otherwise have flowed from Botswana Television has now been wasted, perhaps irredeemably so. Given all the euphoria that surrounded its creation in the nineties, the state owned station has definitively not lived up to public expectations. The News and Current Affairs segment, once the station’s flagship has now degenerated into a butt of jokes.
It is true to say that many of the shortcomings have a lot to do with the often hysterical political meddling that mainly originates from the Office of the President. But in a big way there is also a lot of self-censorship a significant majority of it happening without a slightest nudging from the politicians.
To be fair to them, more often than not, the wonks at Tsholetsa House have never really had to raise their voices to get things done their way by BTV. Naturally, ruling party politicians have often been more than happy to see that the executive staff at BTV is more than willing to do their political bidding without the slightest political goading. Such self-censorship comes from a burning desire to ingratiate and impress the politicians by journalists and their supervisors.
It’s amazing how the overzealous lot often run the roost at BTV. This manifests itself in grotesquely lopsided coverage disparities between the ruling party on one hand and opposition parties on the other. One has to be dumb to not be embarrassed by the disparities. It is neither justifiable nor defensible.
Excessive use and abuse of BTV to prop up the ruling party have now rendered the station utterly unbelievable in the eyes of the public, including to ruling party sympathizers. Having become so badly contaminated, the tragedy of it all is that neither the ruling party nor government are now able to meaningfully use BTV to communicate any credible news to the nation. Everything coming from BTV, including otherwise important announcements is now invariably looked down and dismissed as spin.
Instead of being a valuable information platform for those in power, BTV has now become a liability. One would have imagined that following a change in our political makeup since after the General Elections last year, BTV would by now have changed or at least made an attempt to adapt to new realities. That has not happened. Instead the station has doggedly stuck to the same old narrative that has decimally failed to deliver results for its masters leading into those elections. They are behaving more like feudal tribesmen, who are driven more by loyalty than reason.
BTV’s tortured dogma that preference should be given to the party in power can no longer be sustained. In fact that way of thinking is today at the root of credibility crisis besting BTV. Executives at Botswana Television are better advised to internalize the fact that days of a one-party-state are over and that the sooner they regard the decline of their beloved BDP as largely permanent, the higher will be their chances of ultimately positioning the station on the right side of history. The importance of opposition in our body politic cannot be overemphasized. That importance can certainly not be wished away by a television station recklessly trying to turn back the hands of time.
Notwithstanding contradictory evidence, more often than not, BTV executives often come across as genuinely believing that President Ian Khama and his party own time – that everything will go according to his and his party’s liking and preferred pace. The more the ruling party use and abuse BTV the worse its predicament will get. For their part, the opposition should stop moaning about not being covered by BTV. Instead they should sit back and enjoy the circus. One would have hoped that by now BTV would have learnt from its mistakes leading into the General Elections; that in the eyes of the voter, its patently skewed favouritism of the ruling party against the others was in the long term proving to be a problem for both the ruling party and government. From what happened last year it is clear that BTV obsession with the ruling party has now become counterproductive.
Bombarding the public with silly footages meant to endear the ruling party to the electorate is having a reverse effect. It is creating an embedded mindset of contempt that will with time get so ingrained in people’s psyche that no amount of public relations will be able to undo. Leading into the General Elections BTV disregard for opposition unleashed a totally new wave of public contempt for the ruling party. One reason why few people ever bring themselves to take BTV seriously is that it is so manifestly, so patently biased against those holding views different from the ruling party.
There is no disputing that BTV’s usefulness to the ruling party was immensely important while it lasted. Now the station has become not only a liability but a problem. If BTV were a private station, a good number of BDP strategists would by now, we are inclined to suspect, have long lodged formal complaints about how the station’s obsession and tendency to sugarcoat and overly sanitise its narratives which by itself inadvertently soils the party’s message and also rendering the leadership look somewhat unbelievable. But because BTV is a state owned station, everybody inside both the ruling party and its government somehow think the station is through its actions doing them a good service.
Subjecting opposition to a news blackout while perennially showing the state president doling out soup, cookies and blankets whose sources have not been declared cam only be good in a short term ÔÇô in the long term it gets self-defeating. BTV, or at least its leadership, has become too emotionally attached and embedded to the BDP to be expected to provide any rationale coverage. The trouble with this relationship is that even when the BDP and/or its leadership say something sensible, the public dismisses it out of hand because the messenger has become irredeemably contaminated to be taken seriously much less believed.
For most of the time BTV executives come across as genuinely confused at criticism that they are giving disproportionately higher coverage to the ruling party. They will simply never accept that giving a skewed preference of one party against others is a clear cut case of low-brow journalism. This fundamental defect is simply not apparent to them. One of them once casually remarked that there is no difference between ruling party and government. The statement was calculated to enarmour him to the establishment. Instead the careless remark left both the party and government seething with shame, embarrassment and thinly contained anger. That in a way reflects what BTV itself has become to both ruling party and government.
