My life and times at Mmegi—
How does a mere Advertising Agent find himself inside the country’s most authoritative newsroom and managing the most influential digital media titles? In this second installment, THALEFANG CHARLES recounts the Editorial days of his life and times at Mmeg
Reporters can attest to this; you never forget your first byline in the newspaper. Even to this day, I still love seeing my byline in the newspaper. My first article in the newspaper was a travelogue. I had gruelled my body by walking about 120km in the three-day Y-Care Charitable Trust’s Makgadikgadi Pans Walk.
With blisters, and having experienced Makgadikagdi Pans for the first time, I had so much to tell. So, I wrote my first travelogue and sent it to Tshireletso Motlogelwa, who was then Mmegi’s features editor. Motlogelwa did not publish the article, but he gave me some good feedback about my writing. And coming from him, I was really encouraged.
The article then surprisingly appeared in The Monitor which was then edited by Kagiso Sekokonyane. I was still an Advertising agent under the Commercial Department and the publication of my first article reignited the childhood dream of being a writer. The deferred dream that was nurtured by Serowe Library, during the days when I quit playing house in protest of being made a rooster instead of the coveted father role, was becoming a reality. But it would take a few more years for me to join the Mmegi Editorial team.
Before the digital media revolution, Mmegi Managing Director Titus Mbuya appointed me to the company’s new post of New Media Coordinator. I was responsible for drawing Mmegi’s
digital strategy with a vision to make it engaging and profitable. And this included social media, at the time when some people thought Facebook
was just a dating site. I proposed that the New Media department should be housed within Editorial. And that is how I left the Commercial department, which was my initial entry into the company.
The first person I hired was a web-developer called Lekang Morapelo. Morapelo is a brilliant programmer who was able to build innovative tools for our digital department. It was a new thing for a media company to hire an inhouse web-developer. The way I saw it was that technology was moving so fast that to keep up, a dedicated programmer must form part of the core Digital team. Morapelo was able to build everything I proposed, new website, web-based content management system, website widgets, and she also secured the website.
Mmegi Blogs was my favourite innovation after Mmegi Travel. I hired thought leaders who
included Lawrence Ookeditse, Uyapo Ndadi, Keletso Thobega, Oteng Chilume and Kealeboga Dihutso for a weekly commentary on topical issues. I enjoyed their opinions and wished they continued to write for us.
The Mmegi website received lots of cyber-attacks under my watch. Hackers continuously attempted to take us down. In 2015 we got our most destructive hack ever, as the cyberterrorists wiped out the entire Mmegi website with over decade of archives. It took Morapelo some sleepless nights and days to restore the website and prove our resilience. She was always on standby 24 hours a day and 365 days a year. During holidays when everyone was relaxing with family, she had to be extra vigilant because hackers usually hit us during those down days, like the Christmas break. Some of the attacks were suspected to be State-sponsored because they occurred during times when Mmegi was carrying explosive reports about corruption probes of the Directorate of Intelligence Security (DIS). Social media eventually gave us a breather because it brought multiple secure platforms to carry our content.
Mmegi embraced social media as early as 2009.
Mmegi Facebook was created by the then Features Editor Motlogelwa, before assuming the Mmegi editor role. And all the other social media accounts for Mmegi and The Monitor, including
Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, PressReader and WhatsApp were created by me.
Mmegi was the first newspaper to use Facebook to report the elections during the 2009 General Election. I remember on the elections eve, Motlogelwa assigned me to use Facebook to report elections. The page had about 200 followers then. Armed with my small phone I reported results as they came in through our reporters on the field and the heavily resourced State media who covered every constituency. I remember staying up through two nights, drinking Castle Lite while waiting for the signature song from RB1 to grab results and post them.
The timely updates were so popular that after elections the page had over 300% growth of followers to just over 800 – and these were decent numbers 13 years ago. That was the beginning of Facebook reporting in Botswana, which followed the social network’s development features, like News Feed, Live, Links, Share, Status, and the revolutionary ‘Like’ button. I was there when the Like button became the currency of the Internet.
Soon I was an Administrator of Botswana’s most influential media pages and that demands a lot of responsibility. For over 13 years I made sure that Mmegi digital credibility stayed intact. The rush to be the first to break news comes naturally for journalists, but I made sure that our digital news publishing followed the same verification process for the hardcopy. I have always believed it is better to be right than be first. One of the worst mistakes of rushing to be first was when we erroneously announced the passing of the former Vice President Mompati Merafhe.
One of the senior members of newsroom insisted that his close sources in the family had already confirmed. We updated and soon learnt that Merafhe was alive and other media houses were already quoting us. It was one of the worst mistakes and I made sure that it never happened again. Even later when young reporters brought explosive breaking stories, I made sure these were verified. I used to tell them, “The people will only believe it when we post it”.
Before writing there was reading. I am from the generation that watched television from across the street because we were too dirty to be allowed inside wealthy neighbours’ sitting rooms. My grasp of the English language had always been through the written word. Words that I knew the meaning of, but never pronounced them out. I read and collect books.
And ever since I was a child, I religiously read newspapers. My perfect Sunday has always been listening to Dipina le Maboko on RB1 while reading the weekend papers, especially South African weeklies. I enjoy well written articles. Some of my favourite local writers are Motlogelwa, Botsalo Ntuane, Duma Boko, Titus Mbuya, Gideon Nkala, Mqondisi Dube and Kgosietsile Ngakaagae. I have always loved satire, from Barolong Seboni’s Nitty Gritty, to Ntuane’s Loose Cannon, Chekwane and Ben Trovato. Bongani Mandondo is my greatest inspiration.
One of my memorable first articles in the newspaper was a sport article covering the first ever promotion of my home team Miscellaneous into the Premier League. I was assigned by Tshepo Molwane and I travelled alone to Serowe to cover the most historic sporting event ever to happen in Serowe. A few weeks after that, I wrote a Dear John letter to Township Rollers letting the city team know that my ‘childhood sweetheart’ Miscellaneous had arrived in the city and this was published in The Monitor. I later lost interest in sport and focused on travelling.
Coupled with the new Facebook where we could upload images to show friends our adventures and get my travelogues from exotic places, I got hooked into travelling. My adventures with photographer Pako Lesejane of the Botswana Guardian became regular features in the newspaper.
Contributing mostly travelogues, arts and feature articles under the previous Mmegi editor, Ntibinyane Ntibinyane, got me more into doing investigative stories. Before long I was in the deep end doing dangerous investigation stories. One of the biggest cases I did was the then director-general of the DIS, Isaac Kgosi’s probe.
A source gave me a box full of damning materials with explosive secret documents, videos and audio files. These were the days when DIS was cracking down on media for writing stories about their boss. Our source was a brave gun-toting fella whose motives inspired me to disclose corruption at all costs.
Ntibinyane was also one of the Mmegi’s bravest editors. He wanted stories that made impact and never censored himself. In the last edition of 2014, we published a pullout of our hard-hitting investigation titled Kgosi- The Complete Investigation.
It was also during Ntibinyane’s editorship when I got paired with young cub reporter, Sharon Mathala, to chase some big stories. At a tender age, Mathala was fearless and loved big stories and that drove her to chase stories that some people considered too dangerous. One of the brave assignments that we undertook was investigating the then President Ian Khama’s Mosu compound.
Driving a rented vehicle with foreign number plates, disguised as clueless young couple on holiday in Makgadikgadi Pans, Mathala and I drove undercover right inside the mysterious presidential compound. Our cover was nearly blown just about five minutes into the place, when one of the soldiers recognised me. We acted lost and requested for a way to Kokonje - Plan B.
We stopped on the way and acted like taking pictures of ourselves jumping on an empty Pan, while I was zooming onto the place. No reporter has ever successfully made that daring venture. Months later when INK Centre of Investigations team including Ntibinyane, Joel Konopo and Kaombona Kanani tried to do the same, they were caught out before they could even see the place, and left “traumatised”, they said. Mathala and I successfully returned with both the story and first ever pictures of the place and its controversial airstrip.
During Oarabile Mosikare’s editorship I went back to focusing on only features and arts. The features’ desk was led by an excellent scribe Mbongeni Mguni. He is a very careful reporter whose articles always have great depth. Features meant I would once again travel far and wide, looking for fresh stories and beautiful photographs. And so, my life changed when I found the Okavango Delta.