I read a Facebook post recently with a mixture of dismay and disappointment. Not because it criticised government but because of how casually it discarded core democratic principles in favour of political expediency. The post argued that the Umbrella for Democratic Change (UDC) is “losing the propaganda battle” because it has failed to deploy state media aggressively in its favour, warning that political survival depends on doing so. That reasoning should alarm anyone who values the republic more than party fortunes.The language was blunt. State media was framed as a political weapon waiting to be unsheathed while government communication structures were dismissed as “dead” for not forcefully pushing the ruling party’s agenda. In a democracy, such thinking is not merely careless. It is dangerous. It echoes an outdated conception of power where the state, government and ruling party collapse into a single entity. Botswana’s democratic tradition, however imperfect, has endured precisely because it has resisted that temptation. More troubling still is the post’s narrow reading of Botswana’s media environment. We do not operate in a vacuum where Btv and Radio Botswana alone shape public opinion. The country now has a plural, if often chaotic, media ecosystem: private newspapers, commercial radio stations, online publications, investigative journalists, citizen journalists and social media influencers whose reach often surpasses that of traditional broadcasters. To suggest that a governing party’s legitimacy hinges solely on controlling state media is to ignore this reality and to underestimate citizens themselves.
German philosopher, Jürgen Habermas, describes the public sphere as a space where citizens deliberate freely on matters of common concern. That space is fragile but it collapses entirely when communication is treated as command rather than dialogue. Once state media is openly recast as a partisan instrument, trust evaporates. Audiences disengage not because messages are poorly crafted but because the messenger has forfeited credibility.
