Mmegi banned from btv's newspaper review programme

LEKOPANYE MOOKETSI
Correspondent | Monday March 14, 2011 00:00

This time Kaboeamodimo has become vengeful and banned Mmegi and its sister newspaper, The Monitor, from the list of newspapers reviewed on Botswana Television's (Btv) morning show.

A Btv employee has told The Monitor that Kaboeamodimo has ordered that the two newspapers should not be reviewed following a series of articles that Mmegi carried about him. For some weeks now, both Mmegi and The Monitor have been missing from newspapers reviewed on the morning show.  When there are no other private newspapers for the show, the presenters review only the government-owned Daily News.

Kaboeamodimo was terse when asked about the latest development at the Mass Media Complex: 'It doesn't matter what you ask me, you always write your own things. So why don't you go and write your story.  Thank you, go siame,' he snapped before banging the phone down.

This is not the first time that the government has banned private newspapers from the Btv programme. In the past, the former minister responsible for the media, Boyce Sebetlela, also banned the review of private newspapers.

Sebetlela said the department could end up being sued if Btv reviewed private newspapers because they wrote controversial issues.  It has come as no surprise that Kaboeamodimo has banned Mmegi because he seems to have declared war on the private media lately. He was recently promoted to the post of deputy PS amid controversy about the manner in which he was running the department of broadcasting services as director. The controversy was about the way he allegedly failed to exercise an even hand in dealing with employees, especially junior officers. So serious were the allegations that some of the employees took up the matter with the Directorate on Economic Crime and Corruption (DCEC) and the Ombudsman.

Kaboeamodimo has also been accused of having a romantic relationship with Btv employee, Gloria Kgosi, an accusation he has tacitly admitted to. Other Btv employees charged that he had gone out of his way to do Kgosi favours on many occasions, including fast-tacking her promotion from B to C scale.

In the end, the crux of the matter was that the employees wanted an investigation into the department. A number of Btv journalists, some of them highly skilled, have been transferred from the Mass Media Complex at the instigation of Kaboeamodimo.

Towards the end of last year, a veteran of the department of broadcasting services, Sakaeyo Jannie, received a letter transferring him to the department of women's affairs at the Ministry of Labour and Home Affairs.  However, Jannie challenged the transfer and took up the matter with the Industrial Court. The Directorate of Public Service Management (DPSM) eventually cancelled the controversial transfer.

Kaboeamodimo, who is from a prominent Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) family in Kanye, has been accused of being pro-BDP.  Earlier in the same year, he went on both television and radio to read a statement by President Ian Khama on a purely political party matter, though there was probably not much he could do in the face of such an instruction.  

This was at a time after Khama suspended former BDP secretary general, Gomolemo Motswaledi, and apparently felt the need to justify the action, though by means of a tedious monologue. Unabashedly, Kaboeamodimo subsequently said he saw nothing wrong with reading a political statement.

As more allegations of his partisan leanings came tumbling out, some Btv employees said Kaboeamodimo had ordered them not to cover opposition party events.  The ban extended to even high profile developments such as when MPs Patrick Masimolole and Phillip Makgalemele defected to the Botswana Movement for Democracy (BMD).

However, Kaboeamodimo ordered full coverage when the two MPs returned to the BDP fold.

A Btv employee, who preferred anonymity, says Kaboeamodimo once stopped a news crew in its tracks when it was en route to cover a bye-election in Tonota North and ordered it to go and cover a BDP event somewhere else. But inspite of this groundswell of complaints about him, Kaboeamodimo has never been sanctioned. The controversial man started as a presenter on RB 1.  He left the radio station to join BOCCIM as a public relations officer. From BOCCIM, he worked for Botswana Telecommunications Corporation where he ended up taking a retrenchment package.

His next stop was Botswana Telecommunications Authority (BTA) from where he was plucked to become the director of broadcasting services.  Since then, Kaboeamodimo has been in the news for all the wrong reasons. His latest action will deprive viewers of a vital news spread because Mmegi is the only private daily in Botswana.