Our heritage

SANDY GRANT | Thursday July 11, 2013 00:00

 

Egner, a Botswana citizen, was the brains behind the paper. The Examiner's first edition was a glossy colour affair which coincided with the annual Gaborone International Trade Fair making a fairly handsome profit according to Egner.

The paper subsequently moved to cheaper black and white newsprint production as an eight pages weekly English Language newspaper based in Gaborone with a circulation of between 5,000 and 7,000 copies, compared with the Guardian which started seven weeks later with a circulation of 3,500 copies weekly. The emergence of the The Examiner was welcomed by many readers as a 'bird of good omen' in a land that had for too long suffered from a chronic lack of a quality private press, judging from readers' letters. It had a high-minded journalistic tone, particularly on public policy issues, unmatched in the history of the press in Botswana.

In terms of tone and mood, The Examiner was a classic combination of aggressive journalism blended with cynicism - a mixture of both shortcomings andsuccesses. In fact no pother newspaper in Botswana has ever been so much the reflection of its editor's own personal character. Egner himself explained that, 'The Examiner was born out of a revolt against an erroneous judgment of critics that an independent press cannot flourish in Africa'. It presented a fierce challenge to the government's public policy directions with amazing bravery.

In fact the symbiotic relationship of the paper's editorial tone and the editor's character, made some within the bureaucracy and even some members of the reading public (scanning from press, readers' letters) to equate the paper's investigative journalism with mud raking and sensationalism, which Egner, in turn, equated in response, with chasing malfeasance and corruption - a diversion with which some conservative readers seemed to be uncomfortable.

Egner, with vast experience in news media management, (he was the country's first Director of Information Services), was undoubtedly impatient and sometimes even cynical with the bureaucracy and corruption. He possessed extraordinary talent focused strictly on factual reporting and maintained remarkable originality of thought. Clearly, a hard-nosed investigator and analyst of public policy issues, Egner found it difficult to cure himself of his infatuation with interpretative journalism and an adversarial mindset on public policy makers (politicians and bureaucrats) whom he seemed to look upon as corrupt opportunists and potential destroyers of Botswana. He, however, handled public policy debate with a remarkable success unmatched by any surviving paper in Botswana even today.

Egner's tendency of often going off baying on government officials like a hound on little foxes once put him on a head-on-collision with government. Special Branch police searched his home in 1983.

The government bureaucracy saw The Examiner as a hostile power let loose upon the state to a point where it could ultimately become a major determinant of public policy judgment, capable therefore of making or ruining the party in power. And this is where The Examiner's major impact lay. The economics of today's journalism tends to all intents and purposes, to attach little interest to the common man as a reader because it is often held that the advertiser, who buys space, does not normally aim to sell to him anyway. So many newspapers tend to become media for the middle and upper classes.

In contrast, The Examiner tended in its own way to be 'the champion of the small man'. Even the language used was simple, brisk, smooth and to the point, with a greater emphasis laid on articles of public policy nature than one can observe in the existing media today.

However, The Examiner was not in the good books of the average educated Motswana. Although its editorial policy was not outrightly aimed at stabbing blindly at public tastes without first measuring the consequences, The Examiner's obsession with forthright commentaries brought it into disrepute with some radical sections of the University of Botswana student body.

Following the paper's editorial comment praising Israel and condemning the Palestinian Liberation Movement in 1983 as well as a feature praising Lucas Mangope, then leader of Bophuthatswana, the UB students' government banned The Examiner's street vending boys from the campus premises.

The Moslem leader in Gaborone also called on all Moslems in Botswana to boycott The Examiner in terms of advertising patronage. This may explain the reason for its eventual collapse. The Examiner folded in April 1983 under severe financial difficulties after intensive efforts to obtain external funding failed. The collapse of The Examiner was regrettable.