Please don’t let them take me to Mpumalanga.
There is mounting evidence that political pressure lay behind the arrest this week of Sunday Times journalist Mzilikazi wa Africa, despite furious denials from police top brass.
All South African citizens must act to stop this unnecessary and clandestine piece of legislation. Read the Civil Society statement on the Protection of Information Bill. You can read the Bill and a few responses after the Civil Society Statement below:
A responsive and accountable democracy that can meet the basic needs of our people is built upon transparency and the free flow of information. The gains of South Africans’ struggle for freedom are threatened by the Protection of Information Bill (the Secrecy Bill) currently before Parliament. We accept the need to replace apartheid- era secrecy legislation. However, this Bill extends the veil of secrecy in a manner reminiscent of that same apartheid past. This Bill fundamentally undermines the struggle for whistleblower protection and access to information. It is one of a number of proposed measures which could have the combined effect of fundamentally undermining the right to access information and the freedom of expression enshrined in the Constitution.
Our concerns:
The Bill will create a society of secrets
- Any state agency, government department, even a parastatal and your local municipality, can classify public information as secret.
- Anything and everything can potentially be classified as secret at official discretion if it is in the ‘national interest’. Even ordinary information relating to service delivery can become secret.
- Commercial information can be made secret, making it very difficult to hold business and government to account for inefficiency and corruption.
- Anyone involved in the ‘unauthorised’ handling and disclosure of classified information can be prosecuted; not just the state official who leaks information as is the case in other democracies
- The disclosure even of some information which is not formally classified can land citizens in jail. This will lead to self- censorship and have a chilling effect on free speech.
- Whistleblowers and journalists could face more time in prison than officials who deliberately conceal public information that should be disclosed A complete veil is drawn over the workings of the intelligence services.
- It will prevent public scrutiny of our spies should they abuse their power or breach human rights.
Who will guard the guardians?
- Officials do not need to provide reason for making information secret.
- There is no independent oversight mechanism to prevent information in the public interest from being made secret.
- The Minister of Intelligence, whose business is secrecy, becomes the arbiter of what information across all of government must remain secret or may be disclosed to the public.
- Even the leaking of secret information in the public interest is criminalised.
- Unusually severe penalties of up to 25 years in prison will silence whistleblowers, civil society and journalists doing their job.
- All these factors will limit public scrutiny of business and government, whether through Parliament or journalists. Accountability will be curtailed and service delivery to the people will be undermined.
Our demands:
The Constitution demands accountable, open and responsive government, realised among other things through freedom of expression and access to information. Our elected representatives are bound by these Constitutional values and any legislation they pass must comply. We demand that the Protection of Information Bill – the Secrecy Bill – must reflect the following: ·
- Limit secrecy to core state bodies in the security sector such as the police, defence and intelligence agencies.
- Limit secrecy to strictly defined national security matters and no more. Officials must give reasons for making information secret.
- Exclude commercial information from this Bill
- Do not exempt the intelligence agencies from public scrutiny.
- Do not apply penalties for unauthorised disclosure to society at large, only those responsible for keeping secrets.
- An independent body appointed by Parliament, and not the Minister of Intelligence, should be the arbiter of decisions about what may be made secret.
- Do not criminalise the legitimate disclosure of secrets in the public interest.
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Sign on today!The deadline for signatures is Friday, 13 August 2010..
Who signs on:
- Civil Society Organisations (South African based)
- International friends (organisations) who share our concerns
- Individuals (mobilise prominent women and men to support the statement)
How to sign on:
Send the name of your organisation and the details of a contact person to Hopolang Selebalo at the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) who is co-ordinating the collection of signatures – hselebalo@issafrica.org.
Join the discussion:
Join the Information AccessNow e-mail discussion group to receive news (including of meetings) and inform others of activities you are involved in. Send an e-mail to Mark Weinberg at majimaji11@gmail.com. Subject: Subscribe: InfoAccessNow.
Spread the word:
Circulate the statement as widely as possible to organisations in all sectors.
Public Meeting:
A public meeting will be held on Wednesday 11 August 2010 (11h00) at the ISS offices in Woodstock, Cape Town (2nd Floor, The Armoury Building, 167 Sir Lowry Road) to discuss next steps. Please attend. Similar meetings are planned for Johannesburg and Durban.
Enquiries:
Mark Weinberg
AIDC
Tel: 021 447 5770
E-mail: mark@aidc.org.za
Protection of Information Bill State Security – South Africa
Idasa Reponse to Protecrtion of Information Bill – Hearings
Ministerial Review Commission on Intelligence – MEMORANDUM ON THE PROTECTION OF INFORMATION BILL
We are currently working on a Social Cohesion project.
Social Cohesion looks at what brings us together as a community and as a country. South Africa systematically went through a process of reverse Social Cohesion during the Apartheid years, the separation of the races was designed to keep cultural groupings apart deliberately and to maintain a form of Social Cohesivness only within that cultural (racial) grouping.
Under the democratic dispensation South Africa is struggling to rebuild its Social Cohesion. Studies (sanctioned by Government) indicate that South Africans are seeing themselves less and less as South Africans and align themselves more by their racial grouping.
Why does it appear that the Rainbow Nation is splitting along racial lines? Has Government failed at unifying its people?
I would argue that its not Government that has failed the people, but rather the people who have failed themselves and failed their country. Government has put into place the necessary mechanisms and frameworks (our constitution for example) to allow its people to connect and bond and to form that common identity. We as South Africans are still dragging the Apartheid mindset with us.
How best then to start practically rebuilding a nation? Sixteen years since the first democratic election and it appears we are moving away from each other. The foundation institution for starting the process of Social Cohesiveness must be at our schools and this is where we are failing, this is where our teachers and principals and school governing bodies are failing. We no longer view the school as the centre of the community (even more central than a Church, a Temple or a Mosque).
What do you think?
On the 12 June 2009 the tenth presidential elections were held in Iran. After Iran’s official news agency the Islamic Republic News Agency, announced that the incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had won the election. The European Union expressed “concerned about alleged irregularities” and the opposition party Presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi stated that he “won’t surrender to this manipulation.”. Mousavi believed strongly that the election was rigged and called for peaceful protests against the “manipulation”
What resulted from Mousavi’s call was hundreds of thousands of Iranians taking to the streets and a swift reaction by the Iranian government to stop these protests. In many cases the clashes between government forces and protestors turned violent. One of the actions the Iranian government took was to prevent news agencies (especially foreign news agencies) from reporting on what was taking place in the country.
Prior to the election the government had also banned access by the citizens to social networking sites such as Facebook, this can only be seen as an attempt to stifle opposing views.
With the ban on foreign media and the Iranian governments control over the local media local activists and ordinary citizens took to the internet to tell the world what was going on. The micro-blogging platform Twitter became a key avenue for Iranian citizens to communicate what was going on in their country. Twitters immediacy and accessibility (Iranian citizens were not only using the internet to access Twitter, they were using SMS to get messages onto Twitter). Pretty soon what started to emerge was that Iran was in a state of revolution.
Twitter was not the only Social Networking site to be used by the citizens in Iran. Flickr, Facebook, Youtube and others were used to communicate what was going on.
#Iranelection has highlighted again (#mumbai – the hashtag used on twitter during the Mumbai attacks) is that a) peoples ability to organise, communicate and improve their circumstances is greatly improved by technologies such as the Internet and Mobile phones and b) the traditional way of doing things is fast coming to an end. The big media houses were shown up again as being lumbering giants who are behind the times.
Social Media expert Robert Scoble at the 140 character conference (which ran between the 15/06/2009 until the 17/06/2009) asked from CNN at the 140conf “Where was CNN on that day, at that time?” (referring to the Iran revolution).
The response from the CNN representative Rick Sanchez “We had people in Iran watching the events unfold, live. Our people were tear-gassed. We were there.”
Scoble response e to Sanchez, “How would we know that? Why didn’t you share that side of the story with us as it was happening? You couldn’t because your show wasn’t on!”
The world exists around shows, people exist around shows. They (the world and people) do not wait for shows.
Progressive Governments can learn a great deal from #iranelection, they must learn that people will make use of open, transparent communication systems in attempting to improve their lives. Progressive Governments must start taking advantage of the high mobile phone penetration rates to create bi-directional communication channels that feed into their developmental programmes: COMMUNICATE.
In South Africa, Government love to spend millions on fancy, complicated, inefficient marketing and communications campaigns. Yet these campaigns are yet to show strong results in favour of the investment. These campaigns do not build communities that allow the citizen to constantly engage with Government or other citizens. #iranelection proves that citizen to citizen support is remarkable through open platforms such as Twitter.
Of course Governments need to be wary. Being open to public (not media) scrutiny does have it pitfalls. Look at the screenshot below, once again from Twitter. On the plus side it does keep government honest, Batho Pele is not a one way street.
Hopefully the people of Iran will get the government they deserve.
For some reason the chaps at ESKOM and NERSA have forgotten that ESKOM is owned by the citizens of South Africa. What that means is that they are accountable to us.
Well actually that’s not true, especially if one looks at ESKOMS recent misdeeds behaviour. ESKOM does what it wants, when it wants. ESKOM executives choose to focus more on bonuses and just in time coal stock piles and less on the countries well being.
Now ESKOM (with the collusion of NERSA) are hiding what is referred to as “commercially sensitive” details of ESKOMS application for a 53% tariff increase from the public. ESKOM is a public company nothing about its financials should be hidden from its owners.
I would encourage South Africans to fax their complaints to NERSA on (012) 401-4700.
Goolam Ballim, Chief Economist at Standard Bank succintly states the problem we will be faced with should ESKOM’s massive hike be allowed:
There’s going to be multiple effects. Firstly, it is going to raise the general level of inflation in the country, because clearly electricity is a core input into production, not just into consumption in terms of residential living. So it will raise the cost of living and within the broad basket of staple items.
