Shame on tribunal supporters
If the views of those who have instigated media muzzling prevail, we can wave bye-bye to democracy in South Africa
"Rights are getting out of hand," declared apartheid prime minister John Vorster not long before the National Party intensified its assault on media freedom decades ago. Justly villified by the ANC for censorship among other abuses of power in the intervening years, Vorster's contempt for the media's watchdog role in society appears to have been forgotten as the ANC launches a similarly sinister attack on investigative journalism.
Shame on those in government who are supporting a statutory media appeals tribunal and secrecy legislation, the Protection of Information Bill, that is currently being pushed through Parliament. They may be mainly powerful individuals with personal grievances against newspapers for exposing their own corruption, but included among them are fair-minded people like Jeremy Cronin of the SACP, a loyal cadre who seems to be putting party before principle in agreeing to privatize public information and kill freedom of expression.
Make no mistake, citizens: The ANC's proposed media regulations are attempts by politicians to deny all South Africans access to information. The media are but purveyors of public information – our information – so the tribunal and info bill pose a direct threat to democracy in their devaluation of the accountability and transparency vested in media freedom via the Constitution. They will prevent the public from knowing exactly how its tax money is being spent, for example.
The Protection of Information Bill empowers government to keep secret any information it decides might harm a broadly defined "national interest". A journalist who publishes such classified information will risk a 25-years prison sentence, with no recourse to a public interest defence. In combination with the proposed tribunal, which also punishes journalists for making politically unpopular disclosures , the ANC's info bill is trying to outlaw investigative journalism and whistleblowing- which since 1994 have revealed such abuses of power as the Arms Deal, Oilgate, the bribing of Selebi, Julius Malema's tenderpreneurship as well as Bheki Cele's recent flouting of tender procedures.
While the Daily Dispatch in East London puts the urgent need for public protest succinctly: "Say no before you know nothing at all", the average South African spends little time reading newspapers and will not be hearing about the threatened censorship through the state-controlled SABC.
In portraying newspaper journalism as unprofessional, biased and a threat to the state, ANC leaders are arguing that the press is incapable of regulating itself; that commercialization has led to the media pursuing profit at the expense of human rights; and that the print media is resistant to transformation because newspapers are not state-regulated. Virtually no evidence, apart from a lone bad apple called Ashley Smith, is presented in support of these charges so it is difficult to engage in debate on the proposed tribunal, as the ANC's secretary-general Gwede Mantashe has instructed the media to do.
Those who recently made representation at Parliament's public hearing on the Protection of Information Bill were aggressively questioned by the ANC, one journalist being asked if he was for the struggle or against it (as if that were relevant to the proposed repressive laws). The subsequent , heavy-handed arrest of a reporter outside his offices while a meeting discussing the tightening of media screws was underway inside the building has intensified speculation on the motives behind the attack on press freedom.
The ANC's proposed censorship at a time of internal succession debates follows tense relations between newspapers and the ruling party after the media focused unflatteringly on President Jacob Zuma's private life earlier in the year. Says Jane Duncan of the School of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University: "In spite of the ANC's protestations to the contrary, it is impossible not to arrive at the conclusion that the party has revived the tribunal idea because some of the party's leaders have been subject to embarrassing exposes… that raise questions about their fitness for office."
The tension has roots in the apartheid era, according to Anton Harber, journalism professor at the University of the Witwatersrand. "Maybe the greatest pain of apartheid was the relentless attacks it made on individual dignity… The media has caused some severe embarrassment for the government. Much of the ANC sees it as an enemy."
Of course, the media should always be accountable; its professional conduct beyond reproach. If the halo has slipped in the perception of the public as well as self-serving politicians towards media integrity, newspapers must strengthen their self-regulatory bodies forthwith.
Where the relationship between the media and the ANC may be inherently strained, however, is in the complex realm of socialization. We are all informed by our cultures and see matters through our own prisms. Peeping through the sometimes impenetrable political correctness that has engulfed this country since 1994 is the fact that many of our politicians grew up under authoritarian African systems of governance, including apartheid, which were inimical to media freedom.
The ANC has recently admitted that it does not take kindly to criticism. The idea that journalists, often casually dressed and perhaps arrogant in some cases, can challenge the highest in the land to explain both their public and private conduct is deeply offensive to some in the ruling party. Indeed, media criticism was clearly intensely irritating to both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in Britain's recent politics. But leaders in the West would not dream of censoring the media because they have no choice but to accept that its freedom is the cornerstone of democracy.
We have to hope that the many men and women in the ANC who uphold the party's traditional values - and know that the country's newspapers are under fire for keeping the public informed on the erosion of those ideals through corruption and other wrongdoing – will make their voices heard in the ANC's upcoming national general council pow-wow. If the politicians who have launched the assault on media freedom and the public's right to know how its affairs are conducted prevail, however, South Africa will no longer be the democracy we have achieved since Vorster's denouncement of rights.
