Were we naive to believe the rhetoric of the liberation struggle - the struggle for a democratic, non-racial and non-sexist South Africa? Or is it simply too soon to expect that a country oppressed by three and half centuries of racism would be able to overcome it in ten short years?
I want to celebrate ten years of democracy - but now my press freedom comrades and I in South Africa are having to go back in time to engage in some of the most basic press freedom arguments imaginable – arguments we thought had been settled ten years ago.
Ill at ease
Zimbabwe looms over us like a gathering cloud. Have you experienced a savannah thunderstorm? A sudden fury of wind bends the trees. The first lightning clap tears the sky apart. The earth shakes in a lion's roar. The heaven’s break and a deluge of rain slashes the earth. Will we too have to suffer the storm to experience that liquid amber radiance of light that follows these outbursts in the sinking late afternoon sun?
Why should a press freedom activist in the tenth year of our democracy feel so ill at ease? South Africa’s Foreign Minister, Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma, recently said she did not see how a Zimbabwe Supreme Court judgement sanctioning state registration of the media was a media freedom issue.
At a press briefing she said she did not understand how the requirement that journalists register with a state-appointed commission would interfere with their professional duties. "I don't see how that would in itself translate to control of the media, unless we could say here, here and here the government has refused a legal application," the Minister said.
State licening of media
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| The Daily News: off the streets |
Well, the Zimbabwe government’s Media and Information Commission has refused to register the Daily News and has refused to accredit dozens of journalists. As a consequence the only independent daily newspaper in the country cannot publish and the journalists in question may no longer work as journalists in their country - not even as freelancers for other local or international media.
State licensing of the media is a straightforward violation of the right to freedom of expression. Many international declarations and legal precedents say so.
’Scholarly debate’
Not long after Zuma’s remarks, South Africa's Minister of Justice, Penuel Maduna, delivered a keynote speech at a conference in Pretoria on Freedom of Expression in Africa. He invited South African journalists, in the light of recent developments ‘in the region’, to conduct a ‘scholarly’ debate on whether media registration automatically constitutes a violation of the right to freedom of expression.
Would journalists in Ghana and Kenya entertain such a debate? Would Dutch journalists entertain such a debate?
At the conference Maduna said South Africa had repealed its earlier repressive anti-media freedom legislation simply as a reaction against the laws and policies of the former apartheid government. He is wrong. Those reforms were underpinned by extensive international research and reflection on human rights by some of our country’s finest legal and constitutional experts, and by the Constitutional Assembly that crafted our democratic constitution.
Until now I was one of those who dismissed the theory that South Africa could follow the path of Zimbabwe. I am no longer so sure. Many analysts point out that the first signs of Zimbabwe’s slide into tyranny began in the second ten years of the ZANU-PF government's rule. Jeanette Minnie is an advisor to NiZA on the issue of freedom of expression. She has been a director of the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) and the Freedom of Expression Institute (FXI), South Africa.
