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Two days good, five days better, say Swazi reporters post workshop

by Brendan Boyle
Thursday, 25 September 2014 08:53 GMT

Swazi journalists tackling a group exercise. Photo by Lindo Nxumalo.

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* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The IMF-backed business reporting workshops gain a new group of fans.

If the measure of a good party is the reluctance of the guests to go home then the recent TRF-IMF Economic Reporting Workshop in Swaziland was a howling success.

Eighteen finance and business reporters from Swazi newspapers, radio and television spent two intensive days in a classroom and declared unanimously at the end that they wished it had been longer. One enthusiast suggested in his course appraisal that the training should have continued for two weeks.

Swazi Finance Minister Martin Dlamini opened the course on Thursday, September 11, and former finance minister Majozi Sithole, now governor of the Central Bank, closed it with a meaty news conference that ran way over the allotted 20 minutes on Friday evening.

Melanie Cheary, who has presented nearly as many IMF workshops as the Fund has had spring meetings, led the course with former Southern Africa bureau chief Brendan Boyle assisting to take the group through the basics of economic theory and terminology - and some fairly detailed analysis of government revenue and debt.
With so much to cover in just two days, there was little time for the icebreakers and energisers that make longer courses so much fun, but working mostly in groups of four, the reporters tackled issues as diverse as ethics and economic cycles with noisy enthusiasm and some innovative ideas. A familiar exercise on the domestic impact of a failed Brazilian coffee crop produced a news diary big enough to launch a Swazi Coffee Gazette.

Swaziland depends for more than half of its revenue on a share of the import duties collected by South Africa on behalf of the five countries of the Southern African Customs Union – South Africa, Swaziland, Lesotho, Botswana and Namibia.
This means the Central Bank and even the Finance Ministry have unusual constraints on the monetary and fiscal policies they can use to drive growth and control inflation. Where South Africa goes they go, with only limited room to manoeuvre.

Swaziland fell into a deep economic crisis in 2010-2011 when the SACU revenue plunged and they had no means to bolster revenue to cover the costs of government and a spendthrift monarchy. It was clear at the workshop that reporters are still working to fully understand what happened then as well as the generally positive measures taken since to recover from that crisis. 

With IMF economist Jiro Honda, head of the Washington-based IMF mission to Swaziland, present for the whole course, reporters had an opportunity to ask and debate questions about the role of the Bretton Woods institutions.
And in the closing news conference, where reporters tested their new analytical skills on the Central Bank governor, Honda seized the opportunity to publicly appeal to the Swazi government to heed its advice on rebuilding its small economy after the havoc caused by the 2010-2011 crisis.

The cooperation between the Thomson Reuters Foundation and the International Monetary Fund to present these two-day courses has been honed to a smooth and lean operation that continues to give scores of developing world journalists a valuable refresher on the skills needed to understand their national place in an ever more global economy.

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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