Cape Town — The decision last week by activists to publicise confidential government reports on provincial health departments would have been a crime if the proposed Protection of Information Bill were in force, activists warned yesterday.

"If the bill were in place we'd be breaking the law," said Nathan Geffen, a researcher for Section 27, which leaked the reports with the Rural Health Advocacy Project. The bill would give officials wide powers to classify information as confidential and imposes stiff penalties - including jail terms of up to 25 years - if such material is published.

"Nathan and all his colleagues would be in jail if the info bill was in place," said Hennie van Vuuren, director of the Institute for Security Studies' Cape Town office. And if they had shared it with the writer of this article, so would she. She could be arrested for possession of the documents.

The bill, if enacted, would make activists hesitate before disseminating information and would create a climate of fear among journalists, said Mr van Vuuren, who is also an organiser of the Right to Know Campaign which is lobbying against the bill. "It will suffocate the media into a culture of silence, and goes against the grain of participatory democracy," he said.

The reports were commissioned by former health minister Barbara Hogan after the Free State stopped providing AIDS drugs to new patients in late 2008, apparently because it had run out of money. The probe was in effect an investigation of years of neglect and mismanagement by Ms Hogan's predecessor, Dr Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, and her director-general, Thami Mseleku, now ambassador to Malaysia.

The Department of Health released a consolidated report in May, showing provinces had collectively run up a debt of R7,5bn by April last year. More than 80% of the overspending was attributed to Gauteng, the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal. The full picture has only now emerged, after the activists leaked copies of all the provincial reports and published them online. These were reports about the conditions in the Free State and Limpopo.

The reports revealed important provincial variations, notably that the finances of the Western Cape and Northern Cape are relatively well managed compared with the rest of the country.

"The rest are shocking, and point to terrible mismanagement," Mr Geffen said.

The report on the Eastern Cape, for example, found the health department was emphasising a clean audit at the expense of service delivery, and there was a lack of accountability as the roles of political and administrative staff were not clearly defined.

"It goes into a level of detail that you can't get from the consolidated report, and gives substance to issues we've known about for some time," said Daygan Eagar, a researcher with the Public Service Accountability Monitor at Rhodes University.