Media Freedom day

NELSPRUIT – South Africa, and particularly journalists in the country, will celebrate constitutionally guaranteed media freedom, freedom of expression, right to communication and access to information on Saturday. This at a time when South African media faces their greatest ever threat, the Right of Acess to Information Act or Info Bill.

Black Wednesday, October 19, 1977. This date was about a month after the murder in detention of Steve Biko, when as part of a brutal apartheid government crackdown, three newspapers including The World were banned the others being the Weekend World and Pro Veritate and their editors detained under the Internal Security Act (of 1950).

The state president issued a proclamation under the Act prohibiting the “printing, publication or dissemination”, apparently being satisfied that the newspapers, “serves as a means for expressing views or conveying information the publication of which is calculated to endanger the security of the State or the maintenance of public order”.

As Harvey Tyson, former editor of The Star, stated of this event in his book, Editors Under Fire: “The end of The World has a special meaning for journalists in South Africa. When the newspaper named The World was shut down by the government, press freedom finally died in this country.

Although closure of the World could not stop the editors and journalists, and those in other newspapers, from stating their opinions and reporting many facts which the authorities wanted suppressed, they knew that from the moment they came to take the editor Percy Qoboza away no newspaper was safe in South Africa.

The courts could no longer protect them.

The Minister of Justice and the Police, Jimmy Kruger, was reported to have said at that time that the ban was justified because “the government’s factual investigation has shown beyond doubt that the newspapers were endangering law and order”.

The ANC was voted into power in 1994 and the future of media freedom was backed by the supreme law of the land, the South African Constitution.

This was threatened when the Info Bill was reintroduced to parliament in 2010 after initially being shelved in 2007.

“The Info Bill, in its present form, if signed by president Jacob Zuma, could mean the death of the free media in this country,” said Mark Kinnear, deputy editor of Lowvelder.

According to Kinnear, the most draconian aspect of the bill is criminalistion.

The moment the bill is signed by the president a journalist or any other person in possession of classified material can be arrested and prosecuted in a court of law. Even knowledge of the possession of classified material will be a crime.

“So if a journalist is supplied information by a source and this information has been classified secret by either the ministries of state security, defence or police, that journalist can be arrested, tried and if found guilty sent to jail for five year. If the journalist makes the information public he or she can be jailed for up to 25 years,” said Kinnear.

Kinnear claims the realities of the Info Bill get worse.

“The bill states the following,”

Any person who harbours or conceals a person whom he or she knows, or has reasonable grounds to believe or suspect, has committed, or is about to commit, an offence contemplated in section 36 or 38 , is guilty of an offence and liable on conviction to imprisonment for a period not exceeding 10 years.

“So should a journalist tell a third party, be it a wife, husband or friend, of classified information in his or her possession, and that third person does not inform the police, that person can be arrested, tried and sent to jail for 10 years, said Kinnear.

The bill, after being passed by parliament in April, was sent back by Zuma to parliament last month to be amended. Pressure groups and political parties hoped that the sections that threatened media freedom would be changed.

“The bill was amended, revoted on returned to Zuma’s office. An incorrect cross reference and a punctuation error were corrected,” said Kinnear.

Now it just needs the president’s signature to become law.

“It remains to be seen if this will happen and if it does, to what extent the state will implement it. However, if Zuma does sign the bill it will be a sword hanging over the heads of every journalist, every editor and every media house in South Africa, concluded Kinnear.