The managing director of the Swazi Observer group Alpheous Nxumalo has told his newspaper's readers that he will not allow prodemocracy voices to be published.
This comes at the end of a year when editors at the newspaper, in effect owned by King Mswati III, sub-Saharan Africa's last absolute monarch, were suspended from duty after claims from bosses they had not been following the original mandate of the newspaper.
Nxumalo, writing in the Observer on Friday (11 January 2013), said democracy activists were trying to 'subvert the national institutions such as the monarchy and the government in order to advance the agenda of radicalising the Swazi nation'.
He said that media had been used 'to attack the government and other subordinates institutions with impunities. This has all been done in the name of freedom of press. I submit that media freedom should not be an instrument for subversive manipulation of society.'
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