Tshireletso Motlogelwa
18 July 2008
opinion
The controversial Zimbabwean Access to Information and Protection Act may be a repressive piece of legislation, but it beats Botswana's Media Practitioners Bill at every turn.
Journalism has been a much talked about, often controversial, topic of the modern world. The number of quotes relating to journalism just reflects an attempt to put into words and proper perspective the giant of modern social and political intercourse that is media practice.
For US Justice, Potter Stewart, the independence of the media remains non-negotiable. "Newspapers, television networks, and magazines have sometimes been outrageously abusive, untruthful, arrogant, and hypocritical. But it hardly follows that elimination of a strong and independent press is the way to eliminate abusiveness . . ."
Others have a much more idealist view of the media: "Journalism can never be silent. That is its greatest virtue and its greatest fault. It must speak, and speak immediately, while the echoes of wonder, the claims of triumph and the signs of horror are still in the air," says Henry Anatole Grunwald. And others find in the love-hate relationship between politician and journalist a certain inevitability.
"For a politician to complain about the press is like a ship's captain complaining about the sea," acidly mused Enoch Powell.Politicians throughout the years have always attempted to organise and sometimes even harness media power through legal and often illegal means.
The Botswana and Zimbabwean governments have had their own encounters with media development in their respective countries and in separate ways, they have tried to 'monitor' and 'legislate' how the media should function in their jurisdictions. The Zimbabwean government has the controversial Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act and also, a codified Criminal Law (Codification and Reform) Bill, both of which have had a bearing on how journalism is practiced in the country, if at all.
The Minister for Communication Science and Technology, Pelonomi Venson-Moitoi, recently gazetted a Media Practitioners Bill primarily for the same purpose. However, a deeper look into the two laws show a worrying trend, the Media Practitioners Bill is even more retrogressive than Robert Mugabe's controversial AAIPA.
Compared to the Botswana version, actually, the Zimbabwe version is a much more progressive piece of legislation, given the departure point from where it takes off.AAIPA, at least takes cognisance, and even gives credence to the need for some sort of 'access to information' provision.
Implicit in this part of the law is that the media has some of sort of role to play in the development and sustenance of a democratic system and thus its name; the Access to Information etc Act. In that way AAIPA appears as a larger, much more sensible and sensitive agenda, compared to the Media Practitioners Bill.
It states its major objective as, "to provide members of the public with a right of access to records and information held by public bodies, to make public bodies accountable by giving the public a right to request correction of misrepresented personal information, to prevent the unauthorized collection, use or disclosure of personal information by public bodies; to protect personal privacy" and most importantly, "to provide for the regulation of the mass media".
The MPB seems to have a much narrower reach and motivation. "The objects of the Bill are to establish a Press Council which will monitor the activities of the media and ensure the maintenance of high professional standards and to provide for the registration and accreditation of resident media practitioners".
Venson-Moitoi's version is even narrower when one considers that Botswana has no legislation which explicitly deals with access to information or the media in general. All that the media in the country have to lean on for now is the constitutional provision of freedom of expression which is principally intended to protect the right of the individual citizen, rather than journalists and the institutions that constitute 'the press'.
This bill makes no attempt to further the needs of journalistic practice, let alone recognise the collective role of journalists in society. In that way then, it does not provide for responsibility of public bodies to provide information. It is not on the minister's mind that a bill of this sort should, before tempering with the rights of journalists, perhaps offer provision for the widening of the landscape within which the media functions.
It can therefore be concluded that the drafter of the bill had foremost in mind, the 'reigning in' of the media. It further seeks to "monitor the activities of the media and ensure the maintenance of high professional standards and to provide for the registration and accreditation of resident media practitioners".
It makes the AAIPA Act look and sound futuristic, visionary even. Therefore from then on, the AAIPA touches on such relatively 'idealist' - if viewed with a local lens - provisions as the "rights of a journalist".
Dealing with access to information, AAIPA notes," every person shall have a the right to access of any record including a record, containing personal information, that is in the custody or under the control of a public body" and if "information can be extracted from a record that contains excluded information, an applicant may have access to the part of the record that is not excluded information". A citizen can apply for a request to get a record from a public body. The head of a public body is required to assist an applicant get access to that information.
AAIPA recognises the special role a journalist plays in the development of the country and thus provides for specific rights allowed him/her known in the Act as "journalistic privilege". A journalist is granted rights "to enquire, gather, receive and disseminate information...to visit public bodies with the express purpose of carrying out duties as a journalist" and "to get access to documents and materials".
The Media Bill establishes the Council, which will be tasked with such objectives as "preserving media freedom". The definition of this "media freedom" is not stated and the context, especially nationally, under which this "freedom" is to be exercised is not set.
The bill is rather designed to "uphold standards of professional conduct and promote good ethical standards and discipline among media practitioners". Without a proper legislative account of what journalists are supposed to do, the bill jumps straight into guiding the practice.
This is not to argue that ethics and professional standards are not worthwhile goals, but rather that, the attempt to venture into such a discussion should be preceded by a discussion of what role that profession, at an individual and institutional level, is expected to perform towards the enhancement of democratic practice.That is where the AAIPA seems a much more sensible and sensitive piece of legislation because it looks at the issues relating to journalistic practice in their entirety whereas the Botswana bill only seeks to deal with the regulation of journalists.
One would have perhaps expected the bill to attempt to locate the media and the journalist in the larger context that places the press fourth in the company of parliament, the judiciary and last, the executive.Otherwise, both pieces of legislation fail for the same reasons.
The concentration of power within a particular political elite, in the case of the Media Bill, on the Minister of Communication Science and Technology can only thwart the principle of the right of the public to information. The media bill grants the minister the power to appoint the complaints committee and the appeals committee.
Under AAIPA the minister has the power to dismiss a journalist while under the Media Bill that responsibility would be done by a committee appointed by the Minister.Both pieces of legislation stress statutory sanctions against wrong-doers but most importantly, both draw the media away from self-regulation towards a much more centralised regulatory system by government.
This seems sinister in the Botswana case, given that even medical practitioners are granted self-regulation under the statutory Nurses and Midwives Act. The more extreme paradox is that the Minister, who has been responsible for the government owned media which has been creaking under complaints of interference, is now supposedly given wider latitude to monitor, through appointees of course, the private media as well. Both pieces of legislation touch on issues of privacy with AAIPA dealing with it in more detail.
The government of Botswana has not attempted to widen the space for journalistic practice. In fact, the opposite may be true. The Declaration of Assets Bill has been rejected covertly. The freedom of Information Act remains a mirage and it is not even among the priorities of government. These instruments would have made it much easier for journalists to practice and perhaps even facilitate the attainment of same ethical and professional standards the Media Bill seeks to achieve.
The Bill however, seen under this context, reveals where the real interests of the political elite lie; to throttle the media. As for Robert Mugabe's interests, well, he has revealed those through much more overt and graphic actions against the media.
The differences between Khama and Mugabe may be that, while Mugabe legalised media freedom, albeit in a limited way, he went ahead and broke that law. Khama, opted out of giving force to the constitutional guarantee of freedon of expression through a through statutory provision for press freedom so that were he offend the right of the public to know, he would still be acting 'within the law'.
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