Further Walk to Freedom or a Short Detour to Orwell’s ‘Newspeak’?

Nelson Mandela suggested that the long walk to freedom is not yet over. The question for every concerned South African today (and our friends abroad) should be whether the government’s proposed Protection of Information Bill and Media Appeals Tribunal will create a sharp detour from that walk. Could they lead us ultimately towards George Orwell’s totalitarian nightmare depicted in his novels 1984 and Animal Farm?

The broad controls proposed on the flow of information are ominous. Even more ominous has been the arrest of Sunday Times journalist Mzilikazi wa Afrika for alleged fraud and forgery. He has written some investigative articles on the killing of whistle-blowing politicians in Mpumalanga and on an uncontested tender to a company renting property to the police. General Bheki Cele has referred to wa Afrika as “a very shady journalist”.

So will we look back to this time and identify it as the tipping point at which a charter of the corrupt began to cover up the looting of state resources, leading us inexorably towards banana republicanism?
We are assured not. At a recent briefing to editors and journalists, ANC spokesperson Jackson Mthembu claimed that it was not in spite of, but because of, the ANC that the press had the freedom it currently enjoyed. Hence the press could not deny the ANC its point of view, nor the views of the public. One of these is concern about the gutter journalism which carelessly ruins people’s reputations.

Certainly, as the Church has always held, a person’s good name must always be defended in the face of unproven allegations.
However when Mthembu said of the proposed Tribunal that, “We believe it will assist our editors in their jobs”, Orwell must surely have shifted uneasily in his grave.

He broadened the discussion, saying that the ANC’s concerns included media ownership. “Print media does not have, nor is in a process of developing a transformational charter, despite the regrettable degree of transformation”, Mthembu claimed. Media24 had a 15% ‘historically disadvantaged individual’ (HDI) ownership and Avusa 25.5%. However, “Caxton and Independent Newspapers has no historically disadvantaged individual participation”.

Newspapers with the least transformed ownership were clearly being singled out and put on the defensive, but there was unprecedented solidarity among the 37 print editors who signed the so-called Auckland Park Declaration strongly opposing the Media Tribunal.
Meanwhile the DA ruffled the feathers of the ANC Chief Whip by saying that they know many ANC members who are deeply troubled by this proposed measure and they intend to lobby them to oppose it. But the sobering fact is that this proposed legislation comes out of a Polokwane resolution to regulate the press, which saw little opposition at the time. The party list system is also unhelpful here. MPs who stand to lose their places on the party lists at the next election are unlikely to revolt against this measure, no matter what they really think.

However, no less a figure than Zwelinzima Vavi of the tripartite alliance has broken ranks and is reported as saying "We are with the editors on this". Tokyo Sexwale also says he’s on the side of media freedom. The fact that the President has also weighed in, saying the media needed to be “governed”, suggests the government must be somewhat concerned by the unease in its own ranks.

The media can take some comfort in this, but without complacency. The long walk to freedom is never over.