That harsh penalty is contained in a bill that the National Assembly approved today by a vote of 229 to 107, with two abstentions. It is officially titled the Protection of State Information Bill, but is widely referred to as the Secrecy Bill. Its opponents include just about every media house in the country; unions whose members were terrorized over their reporting of local government corruption; and most civil-society organizations. The Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer is among those who have been calling this Black Tuesday, a reference to the day in 1977, known as Black Wednesday, when the apartheid regime banned the World, a crusading newspaper, and detained its editor and some of its staff. That, of course, was back in the era when the minority white regime had laws that banned just about everything black, as well as information relating to its brutal suppression of the country’s black majority. Those recalling that time now have been wearing black as a protest against what might have otherwise been an inconceivable move by a body comprised of people who put their lives on the line for freedom from such tyranny.
The ruling African National Congress maintains that the new law will correct restrictive apartheid-era laws, and that it is aimed at threats by “foreign spies,” not at covering up corruption. But many South Africans are skeptical; corruption happens to be rampant in the country, as even South Africa’s President has acknowledged. There are serious doubts about what information the state will deem compromising, given the number of officials who have an interest in protecting themselves against criminal charges.
The provisions that provoked the comparison to apartheid laws would, however, give any whistleblower pause; whistle blowing would have to be done from behind bars. Even someone who happened to come into the possession of a state secret would have to immediately turn it over to the police or security services, or join the whistleblowers in the cells. Presumably, that would mean that journalists who simply heard something from a source or received documents would be subject to imprisonment. The public-interest defense—the notion that the public’s right to know can outweigh the state’s need for secrecy—simply doesn’t exist in the new bill. (The ruling party insists that no country in the world has such a provision—a position challenged by legal experts who point to the Council of Europe and Canadian law.)
One of the messages South African legislators are sending to the rest of the developing world is that, when writing media laws, you can get away by promising country-wide consultation and at some point deciding not to bother. It only results in outcries from citizens who don’t understand that the government has the right to know what’s best for them. This is an urgent problem on the continent. Ethiopia’s Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi, has launched ongoing attacks on independent journalists, including a recent claim that they were “messengers” of terrorist groups. In recent weeks, some six Ethiopian journalists have been arrested, and Dawit Kebede, an editor for the Awramba Times—an independent weekly paper—and the recipient, last year, of an International Press Freedom Award from the Committee to Protect Journalists (on whose board I serve), just had to flee the country after learning he, too, was about to be arrested.
And surely the interim powers-that-be in Tunisia, the mother country of the Arab Spring, will be looking to their southern neighbor as they prepare new media laws. On a recent visit there, I spoke to a long-suffering independent journalist; what I heard caused me to suspect that Tunisia’s new leaders may love what they see coming out of South Africa. It can only give them heart as they tear away at the fabric of a draft media law that has input from independent journalists.
Unless, that is, the not-so-secret hope that many hold in South Africa is realized. One more step has to be taken before the bill becomes law. It must now go before the National Council of Provinces, a legislative body created by the new constitution in 1996 to promote “coöperative government.” That entails consultation with the citizens of the eleven provinces before any bill can become law. The A.N.C. is, however, also the dominant party in most of the provinces. The question now is whether that process can help South Africa remain a role model for countries whose citizens need good information, to help their young democracies grow old with dignity.
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Source: New Yorker
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