Botswana editors forum calls for greater inclusivity and consultation

Correspondent | Friday May 3, 2024 13:26

The Botswana Editors Forum (BEF) would like to join local stakeholders and partners amongst the international community in celebrating and commemorating World Press Freedom.

In particular we would like to acknowledge and appreciate the resonance of the theme of this year’s Press Freedom Day - A Press for the Planet: Journalism in the Face of the environmental crisis resonates deeply with Batswana especially in the light of the elephant and wildlife conflict.

Botswana’s elephant’s population remains an important attraction for Botswana’s tourism’s portfolio and evidently needs to be appropriately protected, nurtured and managed.

The local media needs to be better capacitated to research stories and provide information helping to create public awareness about the nature of the challenges faced and solutions, which are generated by grass roots actors. World Press Freedom Day should help us as Batswana to remember that we are in this fight together.

The Day should be used to reinforce the idea that the public must always have access to accurate up to date information on environment. We should not allow any division of private and state media! We should also shun State Capture of journalists and promote, jealously protect and nurture independence of the media and professionalism. It is imperative that our leaders across the spectrum at both corporate and political level encourage more inclusivity and specialisation in niche areas like the environment and climate change reporting.

Local media needs support from private sector and government to assign coverage of niche reporters outside urban areas like Gaborone and Francistown, which are often overreported. The coverage of villages outside urban areas is costly, creating a challenge for under resourced local media houses.

This is particularly critical now as the country battles food insecurity and our environment being the one asset that could be a game changer in this regard. We therefore need to invest in the diversification of our media landscape and niche reporters accordingly.

Our wealth as a country should be underwritten by a strong and unwavering collective commitment to providing the right support for less resourced members of our community. These resources are both material and otherwise. We are therefore challenged as a country to utilise indigenous knowledge systems optimally and improve the media environment. This will involve introducing freedom of information legislation, which will encourage individuals who are adversely affected by wildlife-human conflict to share their stories in real time.

It is also very important that related instruments are legislated like whistle blower protection for example. Discussions about the environment should not only involve discussion about the heavy population in the northern parts of the country. It should include eyewitness accounts and personal interviews.

Stakeholders should appreciate the communities at the heart of such discordant discourse.

These communities who are often outside mainstream are often underreported and their challenges ignored. Media and communities need to work together to highlight the plight of underprivileged communities countrywide. We are together torchbearers of our democratic values and customs. United we stand, divided we fall!