Indeed, our own experience shows that we need democracy is the bedrock upon which to move our country forward into the millennium and improve the lives of our people. To be sure, a flourishing democracy is a prerequisite for the fulfilment of other ideals, tangible and intangible, including improved material conditions for citizens. But true democracy entails accountability as a means of delivering programmes relevant to the needs of the people because accountable leaders remain focused. Which brings us to this week's adoption of the Communication Regulatory Authority Bill in Parliament. Several MPs expressed their reservations about the bill last week, especially aspects of it that deal with state media. If the bill passed into law in its current incarnation, it would bring about a fundamentally unfair and distorted media environment, boding ill for our country's future prospects of democracy. As we noted from the outset, such an environment does not inculcate economic enterprise in the individual but saps the collective spirit of Ipelegeng - self-reliance at community level. Hostile to the soul of society, it is the path to ruin on all fronts. In point of fact, the Government of Botswana dominates the media landscape. It owns the ubiquitous Daily News and the free-to-air Btv and two-channel Radio Botswana.
With its saturation spread across print and electronic media, the government openly competes with independent media, throwing it to the margins of advertising revenue. To make matters worse, the government has no intentions of backing off from this unfair competition as it muscled its way through to becoming a legal monopoly player in the propaganda stakes. Far from turning Radio Botswana and Btv into public broadcasters in the mould of the BBC or even SABC next door, the government this week established the two wall-to-wall state media as 'his masters voice' from which dissenting opinion will be banished. Lower points are few in the course of our history. It is difficult to understand why government left its earlier path of crafting a liberal - even progressive - media policy by embracing public broadcasting. Afterall, there were cogent reasons for going that route, among them the enlightened ideal of equitable and balanced reporting towards a healthy national discourse. State broadcasting has no such pretensions. On the contrary, we are headed for turning Btv into what critics have called BDPtv for the parochial and unfair gain of one player. By this, BDP MPs have elevated the interests of their party above those of the nation that they purport to serve. But they have also - perhaps unwittingly - ultimately compromised the interests of their own party because true partisans of Domkrag should know that the interests of their party is inextricably linked to the interests of the nation.
