Erasibo Consulting

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

Being a consultancy that specializes in providing our clients with answers to problems required that we very early on had to adopt a Knowledge Management approach. We review, generate and process literally thousands of documents a year, which are relevant to the work we do. We think that we have struck upon an approach that works well for a distributed team of people working on a variety of differing projects in different sectors.
We store most our documents in the “cloud”, we have made our email and calendaring available via remote devices and have integrated our document management into our groupware so we are able to track documents across consulting processes e.g. conception, billing, pitching and so forth. We have also tied together RSS feeds and video streams into the landing pages of our Knowledge Management System, thereby allowing out team to not only look at proprietary information but also public domain information that is related to the project at hand.

We’ve noticed that many of our clients have struggled with conceiving their own knowledge management approaches. Sometimes their approaches seem to be driven by a fascination with new technology and other times the approach seems to be driven without consideration of the real cultural changes that need to take place within the organistion and its network; surprising organisations struggle to formalize the informal process of knowledge sharing.

This three-part slide excellently represents what knowledge management is, how it benefits the organization and what is needed to get knowledge management to work.

This is a new research report on income trends in South Africa.

This report presents a detailed analysis of changes in both poverty and inequality since the fall of Apartheid, and the potential drivers of such developments. Use is made of national survey data from 1993, 2000 and 2008. These data show that South Africa’s high aggregate level of income inequality increased between 1993 and 2008. The same is true of inequality within each of South Africa’s four major racial groups. Income poverty has fallen slightly in the aggregate but it persists at acute levels for the African and Coloured racial groups. Poverty in urban areas has increased. There have been continual improvements in non-monetary well-being (for example, access to piped water, electricity and formal housing) over the entire post-Apartheid period up to 2008.

From a policy point of view it is important to flag the fact that intra-African inequality and poverty trends increasingly dominate aggregate inequality and poverty in South Africa. Race-based redistribution may become less effective over time relative to policies addressing increasing inequality within each racial group and especially within the African group. Rising inequality within the labour market – due both to rising unemployment and rising earnings inequality – lies behind rising levels of aggregate inequality. These labour market trends have prevented the labour market from playing a positive role in poverty alleviation. Social assistance grants (mainly the child support grant, the disability grant and the old-age pension) alter the levels of inequality only marginally but have been crucial in reducing poverty among the poorest households. There are still a large number of families that are ineligible for grants because of the lack of appropriate documents. This suggests that there is an important role for the Department of Home Affairs in easing the process of vital registration.

This report presents a detailed analysis of changes in both poverty and inequality since the fall ofApartheid, and the potential drivers of such developments. Use is made of national survey data from 1993,2000 and 2008. These data show that South Africa’s high aggregate level of income inequality increasedbetween 1993 and 2008. The same is true of inequality within each of South Africa’s four major racialgroups. Income poverty has fallen slightly in the aggregate but it persists at acute levels for the African andColoured racial groups. Poverty in urban areas has increased. There have been continual improvements innon-monetary well-being (for example, access to piped water, electricity and formal housing) over theentire post-Apartheid period up to 2008.2. From a policy point of view it is important to flag the fact that intra-African inequality andpoverty trends increasingly dominate aggregate inequality and poverty in South Africa. Race-basedredistribution may become less effective over time relative to policies addressing increasing inequalitywithin each racial group and especially within the African group. Rising inequality within the labourmarket – due both to rising unemployment and rising earnings inequality – lies behind rising levels ofaggregate inequality. These labour market trends have prevented the labour market from playing a positiverole in poverty alleviation. Social assistance grants (mainly the child support grant, the disability grant andthe old-age pension) alter the levels of inequality only marginally but have been crucial in reducingpoverty among the poorest households. There are still a large number of families that are ineligible forgrants because of the lack of appropriate documents. This suggests that there is an important role for theDepartment of Home Affairs in easing the process of vital registration.

Trends in SA Income Distribution

Cross reference this study against this presentation for more depth.

Last night the Riverlea community took to the streets protesting poor service delivery by local government. Riverlea is the latest community to vent its frustrations angrily about poor municipal service delivery.

Since the new national government administration has come in there has been a lot of change taking place in the local government space. A lot of reviewing, rethinking and restructuring has taken place.

The current Director General Elroy Africa delivered the presentation above yesterday at the Local Government Indaba. Its a frank, harsh presentation outlining the problem areas in local government, it’s great to see this type of presentation and suggestions it contains.

However I still think there is one thing missing what is the model that we are hoping to building local government into? Setting targets around which services should be delivered and improving the execution ability is good but without knowing what the game plan is, we could be spending a lot additional time and money to arrive at a similar state later, because everyone busies themselves with being busy.