About BOJA and the Allied Workers Union

RAMPHOLO MOLEFHE | Friday May 14, 2010 00:00

It has evolved from a social gathering of state press employees, to something of a professional organisation especially after the establishment of the first viable private sector newspaper, The Botswana Guardian in 1983.  It is now in the process of transition and further to what should now be a vibrant trade union following the struggle of the Botswana Federation of Trade Unions to compel the government to accede to the International Labour Organisation 'human rights' conventions.

Among others, the conventions require recognition of the right of workers of all categories, including state employees, to organise and participate in trade unions. For many years, BOJA was trapped in the position where unionisation would have meant exclusion of the state media employees who were not permitted by law to form and belong to trade unions.

There is no longer any reason for state employees not to belong to the Journalists and Allied Workers Union.  In fact, there is every reason for that section of the government media employees, to join and participate fully in the activities of the media workers union.

That should happen, not for the sake of the well being of the trade union movement only, but rather, for the very advancement of the economic, social and political rights of the largest section of the media establishment in Botswana.

It is only the state media employees who can liberate the government media, including the Daily News, the Botswana Press Agency or BOPA, Kutlwano, Radio Botswana and RBII and Btv from the stranglehold of political control by the ruling party represented in the Minister of Science, Communications and Technology.

Liberation of the state media employees will lead to acceptance of genuine public broadcasting which is a necessary part of the campaign for the advancement of democracy in Botswana.  It will also lead to greater government respect for the private press establishment of community based media.

In fact, it is the continued existence of this dinosaur in the form of the state media which is responsible for the intransigence of government in refusing to grant the journalists of Botswana true freedom and independence in the conduct of their professional work.

The government is not only intransigent, it has now become as arrogant as to want to prescribe the rules under which the media should operate.  Under the notorious Media Practitioners Act, the government wants the minister of communications to appoint its own press council - something which was there before - and to determine who will be a journalist and who will not be one. 

The government pretends that it has the interests of the citizens at heart when it dictates where in a newspaper an apology to a citizen should be placed.  The law says nothing about where apologies should be placed in the radio and television stations that are owned and totally controlled by the minister. Clearly this law is aimed, not at protecting the interests of the citizen who wants a free and independent press, but at ensuring government control of the state media, the private press, the community based publications and public broadcasting should they come into existence.

Lately, the Office of the President has been issuing theoretical statements on questions such as 'the right to reply' in an attempt to justify the Media Practitioners Act.

Little do the state theoreticians understand that the true journalists of Botswana have long been prepared for that debate, and in fact the principle has been in force since the establishment of the private press.  We only beg of the government spokespersons to desist from relegating what is indeed a fundamental principle of the general ethics of journalism, into a mere legal tool that the privileged members of society can use to bludgeon well intentioned comment into submission.

Surely the journalists - and where they fail, the courts - have enough sense between them to know where an apology or a response to a published article should belong.

The workers of Botswana should stand resolute in their objection to government monopoly of ownership and control of the press.  The workers of Botswana should reclaim their right to freedom of expression and the right to truthful, objective and balanced information.  With that purpose in mind, the workers must reject the intrusion of the government into the determination of what is news and what is not news.  The workers of Botswana must stand firm in their support for the right of the profession of journalism to look after good standards of professionalism, respect for its own principles of professional practice and determination of who belongs to the profession and who does not.

Having so said, it is important to take serious note of the abuse of the rights of journalists that happen not only at the state press but also in the privately owned media.

There are too many instances in which workers work without fair, mutually negotiated contracts between themselves and the employers.  Too many workers work without leave and they are punished for falling sick.  They are deprived of overtime.  They are fired at will. They have no pension schemes.  And very soon, they will be told that they have lost their jobs to this new creation of the American and British financial institutions that is popularly known in Botswana's newsrooms as the 'international credit crunch' or otherwise, 'the global economic downturn'.

The workers of Botswana should not be fooled.  By their own admission, the so-called credit crunch is a creation of the managers of the huge multinationals companies that own and control the mines in Latin America, Asia and Africa.  It is the result of mismanagement by the captains of industry in the capitalist economies which have spread this awful virus to the rest of the world.

The workers of Botswana, the workers of South Africa and Zimbabwe, the workers of America and Europe, the workers of Latin America and Asia are in no way responsible for any such thing that is referred to as 'the global credit crunch'.  That animal is the creation of the capitalist and it has nothing to do with the working people of Botswana, Africa, Asia or America.  Let them take full responsibility for it. Let us not, like the proverbial Uncle Tom that Malcolm X, attempt to own problems that we did not create.

As the 'field niggers' very well know, when the house of the slave master burns down, offering the slaves the opportunity to escape, the 'house nigger' or Uncle Tom will run around madly to report to his master that: 'Master, our house is on fire'.  The field nigger says to the others: 'Let us get the hell out of here'.

Allow us to propose yet again to the trade union fraternity and the working people of Botswana, that we are in the middle of creating a knowledge-based society at whose centre lies journalism, communication and global sharing of information.

At every stage when the opportunity arises, we must take stock of what has been achieved and where we have fallen short. There has been a good amount of talk in our society, and particularly in government about the need for advancement in the field of information technology, for short, IT.  That is praiseworthy.

What is far more important though, is to find ways to place IT at the doorstep of the average Botswana household and in the hands of the least privileged of the children of Botswana society.

We do not achieve that by preventing the children from attending school beyond Cambridge.

Neither do we achieve that by keeping the most advanced computers and software in the offices of the executives who hardly ever use them when journalists and office administrators of secretaries are denied laptops and the most advanced programmes.

Needless to say, use of these gadgets also requires training which is in short supply in the modern newsrooms and other sections of the working community.

So, even as we build the infrastructure to facilitate the establishment of a vibrant IT culture, we must also liberate information technology from the propertied sections of the population and extend access as a priority, to the unemployed and impoverished sections of the community.

In other words, the advance of IT must become a popular movement, not the preserve of a few privileged people in our society.

This should not be said only on May Day every year.  It should be the subject of our discourse throughout the year.  So, BOJA in Transition to the Journalists and Allied Workers Union proposes a 'National Plebiscite for the Advancement of Information for Development'.

This gathering of information practitioners, with journalists at the forefront, must discuss what we mean by public media.  It must discuss the role of the trade union of journalists in the larger community of workers organisations.  It must set out that political agenda that will best assist in the forward march of the information age and the knowledge based society.

It must assist in the revival of fora such as the Botswana Press Club where the journalists, the community leaders and citizens will exchange notes about good practices in the gathering and dissemination of information.  This discussion must cease to be the secret domain of the state bureaucrats and the politicians especially as Botswana society appears to be moving steadily but surely towards the precipice of governance by intolerance.  We cannot allow that to happen.

There is need for this debate and discussions to be reflected in newspapers and radio stations that have the interests of the workers at heart.  The BFTU and the Local authorities Unions are aware of the rather fragile efforts that have been made in the past to seek establishment of an alternative information order that reflects the interests of the average citizen and the Batswana.

In 1998, it was BOJA which proposed the establishment of the regional organisation now called the Southern African Journalists Association which decision was ratified at the Recife international congress of the International Federation of Journalists held in Brazil.

We will continue, despite the untruths that have been fed to the government by a few mischievous bureaucrats, to play a role in the advancement of that organisation, which effort is reliant on building a strong trade union movement at home.