Zuma and media at war over official secrets bill

A new official secrets bill proposed by South African President Jacob Zuma's ruling ANC party has sent the country's press and broadcast editors scurrying to their laptops – and this week led to political correspondents organising a sit-in at parliament in protest.

The Protection of Information bill would allow senior civil servants to classify vast amounts of information as confidential "in the national interest". Disclosure of such secrets would be criminalised - with a maximum penalty of 25 years in prison.
 
Hardly a day has gone by in the past month without yet another seriously worded opinion piece in the press accusing the party that freed the nation from apartheid of betraying the constitutional right to freedom of expression.

The great and good from the arts – Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer, author Andre Brink and veteran actor John Kani – recently posted an advertisement in every major newspaper in the land decrying the proposed law as a return to apartheid-era banning orders that would create a "word police".
 
Meanwhile, the news pages have been reporting on the emergence of a new class of mega-rich "tenderpreneurs" – friends and family of politicians and senior officials who win sizeable government contracts.

Most recently Jacob Zuma's son and a few business associates stepped in to grab some lapsed iron-ore prospecting rights from ArcelorMittal, which they then sold back to the multinational steel manufacturing giant for a cool £70 million – a tidy sum for a small company whose only asset of value was the mining licence in question.
 
As the press has stepped up its campaign against the secrecy bill, senior ANC figures have revealed that they feel embattled. Zuma recently turned on the media, dismissing any comparisons between the ANC government's draft bill and the legislation of apartheid regimes as "preposterous... disingenuous and an unbearable insult". In the governmment's defence, state law adviser Enver Daniels has argued that the new bill is necessary to replace apartheid-era secrecy laws that remain in place.
 
In its war of words with the media, the ANC has also made a strong argument for the kind of concerns that it would like journalists to espouse when covering the day-to-day business of fostering what remains a relatively new-born nation of only 16 years.

A recent top-level ANC discussion document contrasts "the ANC's outlook and values (developmental state, collective rights, values of caring and sharing community, solidarity, ubuntu, non-sexism, working together)" with the "media's ideological outlook (neo-liberalism, a weak and passive state, and overemphasis on individual rights, market fundamentalism, etc)".
 
A cursory review of the press's daily output appears to confirm ruling party perceptions. Despite genuine attempts by many journalists to tackle the important developmental concerns facing the nation, sport achievements and wildlife protection frequently receive more front-page space in the nation's flagship dailies than the pressing issues of huge unemployment (at 25 per cent, the world's highest rate), inadequate health services, and widespread poverty among South Africa's majority black population, most of whom live in makeshift townships lacking basic sanitation on the fringes of the big cities.
 
The issue of bias, which the ANC regularly alleges, has also been compounded by serious questions being asked about the South African press's competence to report the news. Poor training and inexperience are endemic and clearly compromise standards in newsrooms. Unsubstantiated allegations and unchecked information substitute for facts in stories too often – as has been acknowledged by editors themselves.

Several leading academics such as Steven Friedman, director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy, have railed against the fourth estate's apparent lack of accountability to the citizenry. Critics of the media's fundamental lack of seriousness also point to the surprising absence from the public hearings on the new bill of the country's two largest publishing houses – Media24 and Independent Newspapers.
 
However, many of those in power who point the finger at the press have clearly benefited from the media's sometimes reactionary coverage. The leaders of rival factions in the country's ruling alliance of ANC, communists and trade unionists continually brief the media on the sins of their rivals, creating front-page splashes alleging corruption in high places as a result.
 
One journalist who failed to play along recently received harsh treatment. Organised crime unit officers arrested the investigative reporter Mzlilkazi wa Afrika earlier this month and removed from his home notebooks detailing investigations that he had conducted over the previous 11 years.

The reporter, who works for South Africa's Sunday Times, has been accused of attempting to frame David Mabuza, the premier of Mpumalanga province. Members of the local government headed by Mabuza have been accused in the press of orchestrating political hits and assassinating whistleblowers who allege corruption at the top. Mabuza has admitted using intelligence services to track his opponents, including journalists.
 
Mpumalanga politicians have featured prominently in reports run by what many consider to be South Africa's weekly newspaper of record – the Mail & Guardian, which cut its teeth as an anti-apartheid publication (and used to be linked to the Guardian of London). The august organ's editor, Nic Dawes, was one of the few journalists to put the media's case directly to the parliamentary committee considering the new bill. He was received with hostility by committee member Hlengiwe Mgabadeli of the ANC. She told him that in his capacity as a newspaper editor she got the impression "there is nothing South African about you".
 
However, it remains to be seen whether charges of unpatriotic behaviour can substitute for true accountability among the country's leaders, or whether the ANC really can unite to regulate the press sensibly, particularly while senior ANC politicians and government officials continue to spin their political webs in public through the pages of the same papers they seek to limit. ·