DOG EATS DOG IN SWAZILAND

Paul Loffler, publisher of the Times of Swaziland, is suing a tiny newspaper in the kingdom for defamation.

Loffler says the Swazi Mirror published an article that said he pays himself E1 million a month as salary whilst his employees earn peanuts.

Loffler’s lawyers now say, ‘If one juxtaposes our client’s alleged monthly remuneration of E1 million (which is not true) with the employees’ salaries, in the context, it implied our client is greedy, selfish and has no regard for the employees’ welfare.’

Loffler wants E400 000 (75 000 US dollars) in damages.

E400,000. Loffler greedy? You decide.

‘SWAZI KING WANTS EDITORS’ HEADS’

What follows is something that journalist like to call ‘unconfirmed reports’ and ordinary folk call ‘rumours’. If any reader has more information, please let me know.

Swaziland’s King Mswati III, sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch, has demanded that Martin Dlamini, managing editor of the kingdom’s only independent daily newspaper the Times of Swaziland, and Mbongeni Mbingo, editor of the Times Sunday, both be sacked for publishing reports that the king had bought up to 20 top-of-the-range Mercedes cars at a cost of about 2.5 million US dollars (E25 million).

The king has also demanded that Vusi Sibisi and Mfomfo Nkhambule both be dropped as columnists by the Times.

We know that Nkhambule has been dropped because he has said so publicly. Martin Dlamini said at the time he was not forced to drop Nkhambule, he did so because the Times was undergoing routine changes with regards to content.

I hear that Times publisher Paul Loffler was hauled before the king and told to produce invoices to back up his story about the cars and then he was forced to apologise when he couldn’t. These apologies appeared in both the Times and the Times Sunday.

What we do know as fact is that King Mswati has intimidated the Times group before. In 2007 it was forced to make an apology or face immediate closure after it repeated a news agency report that was critical of the king.

Nkhambule gained international attention for his articles that appeared each Monday in the Times and were largely critical of Swaziland’s ruling elite, including the king. He was hauled in by Swaziland’s state police and threatened with torture if he continued to criticise the king. He was later dropped from his traditional regiment, threatened with banishment from his homeland, and his family was threatened because he refused to be silenced.

Mbongeni Mbingo, made headlines himself in 2007 when a Swaziland Senate select committee cleared him of contempt of parliament for an article he had written critical of parliamentarians. The committee said he had a right to free speech protected by the constitution.

If any reader has more information email me swazimedia@yahoo.com

SWAZILAND KING’S CARS CENSORSHIP

King Mswati III of Swaziland, sub-Saharan Africa's last absolute monarch, is clearly rattled that news about his purchase of up to 20 state-of-the-art armoured Mercedes-Benz cars for himself and his (many) wives has become public knowledge.

It was reported that the Mercedes Benz S600 Pullman Guard cars that can resist an attack with small arms projectiles, a grenade or other explosive and include high-end audio, an intercom, 19-inch flat screen display, DVD player, refrigerator and wood trim as standard, cost E25 million (250,000 US dollars) each.

The Times Sunday reported this news that has also been all over the Internet.

Now, the Times of Swaziland, the kingdom’s only independent newspaper group, has been forced to make a front page apology. It seems Times’ publisher Paul Loffler was summoned to see the king and as a result the following appeared on the front page of the Times.

APOLOGY

The TImes Group of Newspapers wishes to bring to the attention of its readers and the public at large that an article published in the April 19, 2009 edition of the Times SUNDAY entitled 'E25m cars at Ludzidzini' was not entirely correct and could have misled the public into believing that his was an amount actually spent on the cars. It has been brought to our attention that the cars referred to in the article were not purchased at a cost of E25 million but at a highly reduced figure due to them being ordered directly from the manufacturers in Germany. We therefore would like to unreservedly apologize to His Majesty the King and all affected parties for the misleading information. We wish to state that the Times Group of Newspapers remains committed in its endeavour to provide information accurate and balanced content in a respectful and unbiased manner and that it shares a common vision for peace and development of this country with the people of Swaziland.

By the publisher on behalf of the Times Group of Newspapers.

Keen readers will note that King Mswati is not denying that he bought the cars, but only that they didn’t cost as much as E25 million, because he got a discount. As I said in my blogpost on Thursday (30 April 2009), when reporting the king’s denial in the Swazi Observer, the newspaper in effect owned by the king, nobody has actually said how much the cars did cost.

If King Mswati doesn’t feel the cost of the cars is any big deal, let him tell us how much he paid for them and where he got the money from.

There are sinister overtones to the Times’ apology. King Mswati has form when it comes to bullying the media in Swaziland. In March 2007 the Times Sunday published a report from the international news agency Afro (click here to read it) that criticised King Mswati and included a reference to the king’s spending, ‘Swaziland is increasingly paralysed by poor governance, corruption and the private spending of authoritarian King Mswati III and his large royal family.’

The article went on to say, ‘The growing social crisis in the country and the lessening interest of donors to support King Mswati’s regime has also created escalating needs for social services beyond the scale of national budgets.’

King Mswati threatened to close down the Times group unless an unreserved apology was printed. It was, and the newspapers survived.

The news about the king’s new cars will not go away. I suspect he may have scored an own goal by forcing an apology from the Times over a report that was essentially true. Expect to see more international attention focused on the king who is said to have a wealth of 200 million US dollars (E2 billion) when 70 percent of his subjects live in abject poverty earning less than one US dollar a day, Swaziland has the highest rate of HIV AIDS and tuberculosis in the world and last year six in ten people needed some form of international food aid to avoid hunger.