The public purse is not a private megaphone
Thomas Nkhoma | Monday September 14, 2026 08:11
Botswana does not need State media that simply changes political masters. It needs public media that changes its relationship with power. That is important because changing the occupants of government does not necessarily change the habits of institutions. A new administration can inherit the same machinery, the same newsroom culture and the same incentives that existed before it. That is the uncomfortable conversation Botswana must now have about its state media. For years, criticism of government-controlled media has centred on political bias: whose speeches receive coverage, whose activities dominate the news and whose version of events becomes the official narrative. Such concerns are legitimate but the deeper problem is not simply whether a particular story is biased. It is whether a publicly funded media institution understands that its first obligation is to the public rather than to the government of the day.
The distinction that government communication and public journalism are not the same thing is also fundamental. While a government has every right to explain its policies, defend its decisions and communicate its achievements, conversely, journalism has a different responsibility. It must interrogate, verify, contextualise and, when necessary, challenge those same claims. When the two functions become indistinguishable, something important happens: the public stops being treated as citizens entitled to information and starts being treated as an audience to be persuaded. That is where public interest can quietly be replaced by institutional interest. The irony is that Botswana’s current political leadership has itself recognised aspects of this problem. It acknowledged the longstanding concerns about political influence and disproportionate coverage.
That was an important admission. However, genuine transformation cannot simply mean replacing one political influence with another. Otherwise, we have not transformed public media. We have merely changed the political tenant. The danger is particularly acute because the State controls both substantial public resources and powerful communication platforms. The institution that collects and spends public money can also possess the means to shape how citizens understand the outcomes of that expenditure. That creates a peculiar democratic imbalance. A government can announce a new road, hospital, school or social programme. Its communication machinery can celebrate the initiative, publish photographs of officials and reproduce speeches explaining its importance. But the citizen’s more important question is often missing: Did it work? A road is not successful because a minister opened it. A hospital is not successful because cameras recorded its commissioning. A youth programme is not successful because thousands of people attended its launch.
Public policy succeeds when citizens experience measurable improvement. The difference between publicity and accountability lies precisely there. Notwithstanding, political systems have an understandable appetite for narratives that sustain legitimacy while inconvenient facts can threaten that legitimacy. The danger begins when an institution becomes more interested in protecting its narrative than confronting the reality that the narrative is supposed to describe. That is precisely why a democratic public sphere requires competing voices.
Jürgen Habermas’ conception of the public sphere rests, in part, on the idea that citizens must have spaces in which public matters can be debated, contested and scrutinised. A healthy democracy, therefore, requires more than information from government. It requires an environment in which government information can itself be interrogated. Technology has made this even more unavoidable.
The information monopoly that once allowed governments and established media organisations to determine what citizens knew has largely disappeared. Citizens can challenge an official statement with photographs, documents or firsthand testimony before a newsroom has even decided whether the matter is newsworthy. Consequently, the answer cannot be to retreat into institutional communication and dismiss citizens as uninformed simply because they challenge official narratives.
The answer is stronger journalism, better media literacy, greater transparency and a wider public conversation. State media independence cannot be achieved merely by changing staff or redesigning a newspaper. It requires a different institutional philosophy. A genuine public media should be capable of reporting government success without becoming its cheerleader and reporting government failure without becoming its enemy. It should be able to ask the question that government communication sometimes avoids. And this is where the public purse becomes central.
Public money is not government money in the private sense. Government administers it on behalf of citizens. The same principle should, therefore, apply to publicly funded information institutions. They should not behave as though the resources used to sustain them entitle the government of the day to unquestioning editorial loyalty. The Daily News is not the government’s newspaper simply because government funds it. Btv is not a government propaganda channel simply because government owns its infrastructure. Their democratic justification must ultimately rest on the public interest they serve.
That means citizens must be able to see themselves in these platforms, not merely their government. A farmer should be able to question agricultural policy. A student should be able to interrogate education policy. A patient should be able to speak about the public health system. A researcher should be able to challenge official statistics. An opposition politician should be able to scrutinise government without being treated as an intruder into a government communication space. That is what public media should mean. The real test, therefore, is not whether the government receives favourable coverage. Nor is it whether journalists occasionally criticise those in power. The real test is whether the institution can maintain sufficient independence to tell citizens something powerful people would rather they did not hear.
Botswana does not need State media that merely changes political masters after every election. That is not reform. It is rotation. It needs institutions that understand that political power is temporary while the public interest is permanent. Governments come and go. Ministers change. Parties rise and fall. But the citizens who finance the republic remain. They do not need a private megaphone operated in their name. They need a mirror hence a democratic society should never be afraid of what its public media might reflect.
*Thomas Tlhaloganyo Nkhoma is MISA-Botswana chairperson