The dangerous temptation to weaponise State media in a democracy
Thomas Nkhoma | Monday February 2, 2026 06:00
I read a Facebook post recently with a mixture of dismay and disappointment. Not because it criticised government but because of how casually it discarded core democratic principles in favour of political expediency. The post argued that the Umbrella for Democratic Change (UDC) is “losing the propaganda battle” because it has failed to deploy state media aggressively in its favour, warning that political survival depends on doing so. That reasoning should alarm anyone who values the republic more than party fortunes.The language was blunt. State media was framed as a political weapon waiting to be unsheathed while government communication structures were dismissed as “dead” for not forcefully pushing the ruling party’s agenda. In a democracy, such thinking is not merely careless. It is dangerous. It echoes an outdated conception of power where the state, government and ruling party collapse into a single entity. Botswana’s democratic tradition, however imperfect, has endured precisely because it has resisted that temptation. More troubling still is the post’s narrow reading of Botswana’s media environment. We do not operate in a vacuum where Btv and Radio Botswana alone shape public opinion. The country now has a plural, if often chaotic, media ecosystem: private newspapers, commercial radio stations, online publications, investigative journalists, citizen journalists and social media influencers whose reach often surpasses that of traditional broadcasters. To suggest that a governing party’s legitimacy hinges solely on controlling state media is to ignore this reality and to underestimate citizens themselves.
German philosopher, Jürgen Habermas, describes the public sphere as a space where citizens deliberate freely on matters of common concern. That space is fragile but it collapses entirely when communication is treated as command rather than dialogue. Once state media is openly recast as a partisan instrument, trust evaporates. Audiences disengage not because messages are poorly crafted but because the messenger has forfeited credibility.
Botswana’s recent political history offers a cautionary lesson. The Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) did not lose state power in 2024 because it lacked access to public broadcasters. It lost because public trust had been steadily eroded. Years of defensive communication, selective listening and apparent detachment from everyday realities produced a legitimacy gap that no amount of airtime could repair. Control of platforms has never guaranteed control of belief. The Facebook commentary also attributes debate around the Constitutional Court and healthcare reforms to “wrong messaging” by government media as if national disagreements can be reduced to communication failures. This reflects a persistent technocratic fallacy, the belief that dissent disappears when messaging improves. Politics, however, is not advertising. Citizens are not passive consumers of slogans. They are active participants in a shared civic project. When issues touch on constitutional rights, freedom of expression and human dignity, disagreement is not a messaging error. It is democracy at work.
Equally troubling is the claim that broadcasting critical or dissenting views weakens government authority or undermines its mandate. The opposite is true. A government secure in its legitimacy should not fear plural voices, even uncomfortable ones. John Stuart Mill argues that silencing opinion impoverishes society, whether the opinion is right or wrong. If wrong, it sharpens truth through contestation; if right, it prevents stagnation. Democracies do not decay from excessive debate but from its absence.
The post further conflates party communication challenges with the role of state institutions. If political activists who once mobilised through social media, radio platforms and kgotla meetings now feel disconnected, the remedy is not to conscript state media into party service. It is for political parties to rebuild their own communication machinery, reconnect with supporters and engage citizens consistently and honestly. Parties earn legitimacy through persuasion, organisation and presence, not through commandeering public institutions.
Kgotla meetings, often portrayed as hostile spaces where government is “attacked,” are not symptoms of democratic failure. They are evidence of a political culture where citizens feel entitled to speak directly to power. That entitlement is not a threat. It is the essence of democracy. When disagreement spills into councils, public meetings or social media, it reflects an engaged citizenry. Leadership is tested not by suppressing discomfort but by responding to it with openness and restraint. What truly imperils trust, in media and government, is the normalisation of propaganda thinking. Once citizens suspect that information is filtered primarily to serve political interests, skepticism hardens into cynicism. At that point, even truthful communication is dismissed as manipulation. In an age already saturated with misinformation and disinformation, often driven by private actors and anonymous digital networks, weakening the credibility of public broadcasters would be a grave strategic error.
Democracy survives on boundaries: between party and state, between government and media, between power and accountability. When those boundaries blur, truth becomes negotiable and national cohesion frays. The challenge before the current government is not to dominate the narrative but to earn trust through transparency, humility and institutional restraint. State media must inform, educate and reflect the diversity of national opinion, not function as an extension of any party’s war room.
If democracy, as Aristotle suggested, rests on citizens ruling and being ruled in turn, then communication must remain a shared civic good, not a partisan weapon. Forgetting that distinction may yield short-term gains in political skirmishes but the long-term cost is far greater. One may win the message of the day and still lose the republic.
*Thomas Thos Nkhoma is MISA-Botswana chairperson