Who will watch power when journalists join it?
THOMAS NKHOMA | Monday September 28, 2026 06:00
Government ministries, corporations, universities, international organisations and development agencies increasingly employ former journalists as communication specialists, public relations practitioners and strategic advisers. The migration is understandable. Journalism is demanding, often poorly paid and increasingly insecure. Institutional communication frequently offers better salaries, stability and clearer career prospects. No reasonable person should condemn a journalist for seeking a better life.
However, society must confront the consequence of this migration. Who watches power when those trained to watch it increasingly become part of its machinery? The issue is not that former journalists have somehow betrayed journalism by changing careers. It is that journalism loses more than an employee when an experienced reporter walks away. It loses institutional memory, investigative instincts, professional mentorship and the accumulated knowledge of how power operates. That loss matters. A young reporter can learn the mechanics of writing a story relatively quickly. Learning how to recognise when an official explanation does not quite add up takes years. It comes from knowing where to look, which questions to ask, which documents matter and when a seemingly minor inconsistency deserves a second investigation.
That is precisely why the weakening of experienced newsrooms is more serious than the closure of a newspaper or the loss of a job. It is a loss of democratic capacity. Journalism exists partly because institutions cannot be expected to investigate themselves with the same scepticism with which an independent journalist investigates them. An organisation can explain its decisions. A journalist asks whether those decisions were justified. An institution can announce an achievement. Journalism asks whether the achievement actually delivered what was promised. These functions are complementary but they are not interchangeable.
Michel Foucault’s work on power and knowledge offers a useful way of understanding the danger. Power is not exercised only through laws, money or coercion. It also operates through the production and circulation of knowledge. Whoever has the capacity to define what is discussed, what is ignored and how events are interpreted possesses considerable power. That makes the weakening of independent journalism particularly consequential.
Consider what happens when a major investigation is required. It may demand weeks of research, access to documents, travel, legal support and an experienced reporter capable of connecting apparently unrelated facts. A newsroom already struggling financially may simply not have the capacity. The institution being investigated, however, may have an entire communication team. That imbalance is becoming increasingly visible.
The consequences are already evident across many African media markets. Experienced journalists are leaving newsrooms for government, business, development agencies, academia and corporate communication. Young journalists enter a profession with fewer mentors and fewer institutional resources.
The result can be a strange paradox: we produce more people capable of communicating information while producing fewer people capable of interrogating it. Botswana should take this seriously. A democracy does not merely require information. It requires independent scrutiny of information. Who asks what happened to a government programme after the launch ceremony? Who examines whether public money produced the promised result? Who follows up when an official promise quietly disappears from the public conversation? Who challenges the convenient explanation?
Such questions cannot be answered adequately by institutional communication because it has a different mandate. That is not an argument against public relations. Nor should former journalists be treated with suspicion simply because they have changed careers. The problem is structural. If journalism becomes the profession from which experienced people continually escape while institutions of power become the destination of choice, the balance between power and scrutiny inevitably changes.
There is also a generational consequence. If experienced journalists leave before passing their knowledge to younger reporters, the profession’s collective memory becomes thinner. Investigative journalism becomes harder. Editorial judgement weakens. The young inherit a profession without enough elders to explain why certain battles were fought and why certain lines should never be crossed. Eventually, society may discover that it has preserved the ability to communicate while losing the ability to question. That is why saving journalism cannot simply mean saving media companies. It means preserving journalism as a form of democratic infrastructure.
We need sustainable business models, investment in investigative reporting, professional development and stronger protections for editorial independence. Most importantly, we must create conditions in which journalism becomes a profession from which experienced people do not feel compelled to escape. The uncomfortable question is, therefore, not why journalists leave.
We already know many of the reasons. The uncomfortable question is what happens to democracy when too many of them do? Power will continue to speak. It will always find people willing to tell its story. The real danger is reaching a point where too few independent journalists remain to ask whether the story is true. And when that happens, the silence will not necessarily be caused by censorship. It may simply be the consequence of having lost the people whose job was to ask the difficult questions.
*Thomas
Tlhaloganyo Nkhoma is MISA-Botswana chairperson
As experienced journalists abandon shrinking newsrooms for the institutions they once scrutinised, Botswana faces a troubling democratic question: Who will remain to hold power accountable? Writes THOMAS TLHALOGANYO NKHOMA*