We will not be intimidated

Mmegi Editor | Thursday September 11, 2014 11:46

Security agents swooped on Sunday Standard offices and demanded that the newspaper’s editor Outsa Mokone should tell them where senior reporter Edgar Tsimane was. Mokone told them he was not Tsimane’s keeper, and quite rightly so. For what intelligent person comes asking a supervisor about the whereabouts of another grown up person with full and functional mental faculties? The security agents, apparently out of anger and in a bid to get Mokone to talk, arrested him.

They took him to Broadhurst Police Station where he was charged under some vague section of the Penal Code.  He was thrown into some smelly holding cell and denied the right to talk to his attorney Dick Bayford. Now, that is sacrilegious.  Nowhere in the democratised world do we hear about detained people being refused the right to an attorney. Yet, it happened in this country, touted as Africa’s shining example of democracy.

The following day, security agents raided Sunday Standard offices, and confiscated Mokone’s hard drive.  Apparently they had some court order to do so.

It was not until late Tuesday that Mokone was freed by consent of his lawyers and the Deputy Attorney General Nchunga Nchunga.

Meanwhile Sunday Standard senior reporter Edgar Tsimabe sought and received asylum from South Africa. We publish in this edition, his reasons for seeking asylum. We have no doubt, as readers will equally come to the same conclusion, that Edgar’s DIS brother called him under duress.

Needless to say the issue has resulted in conflict and much pain for the Tsimane family and could possibly drive a wedge between the two siblings themselves and their parents. 

It is apparent the DIS or whoever has been giving orders for the media to be intimidated knew Edgar had a brother among DIS ranks, and used that as a pivot to scare the writer’s parents, who could not bear the thought of losing two sons.

We are certainly interested in knowing what matter of national security Tsimane presented in his professional work? We are yet to see a story that breaches national security in Botswana.

We also wait to see who the DIS will terrorise after they confiscated Mokone’s hard drive, which quite possibly carries e-mails and other information on some of his informants. We shall know whatever the DIS does to them. We know government has been terrorising sources. That is bad enough. But going for journalists in the course of their duties is even worse. Bringing fear into the lives of family members and loved ones is the modus operandi of despots. We need swift answers why Mokone was detained for nearly 24 hours.

                                                             Today’s thought

              “I will spend a 100 years in their prisons than spend a day as a prisoner of a guilty conscience”

 

                                                           - Outsa Mokone