Journalism under siege in SADC

Editor | Wednesday August 25, 2010 00:00

Six months ago, the Nordic-SADC Journalism Centre in Mozambique was on the brink of closure.  A few weeks later, a website announced two or three editors' courses in South Africa to be conducted by an institute shaped along the lines of the NSJ.  Little has been heard about thoroughgoing edification of journalism in Namibia after the glorious Windhoek Declaration and the meetings that led to the legal establishment of the Media Institute of Southern Africa.

The Southern African Journalist Association based in South Africa is still very much in its teething stages and is concerned more with political problems in Zimbabwe and Swaziland while paying lesser attention to the creation of journalists through independent trade unions, mechanisms of self-regulation and the upkeep of a genuine and rigorous debate about professional standards and issues of ethics in the 21st Century.

The rise of Information Technology has been lauded as a development in favour of development as if it is without fault an instrument of the upliftment of the most disadvantaged peoples of southern Africa.  Journalists in Zambia face official rejection of the model they suggest for self-regulation, something that the journalists of the region looked at with envy when the then Minister of Information in Frederick Chiluba's newly-elected government in 1991 wanted to reform the old information order.

South Africans are at great pains to undermine the basic constructs of self-regulation that were put up by the Boers to facilitate professionalism and good ethics in journalism.  Sadly, the benefits of that regime excluded the majority of the citizens, and for that reason - if only for that reason alone - they were fundamentally flawed.  Now they speak about a Media Tribunal that will be conveniently subject to oversight by a parliament that, like in Botswana, is tilted heavily towards the ruling party.

Clearly, the South Africans are learning the wrong tricks from Botswana.  Ironically, the Zambian authorities argue that they will not accept the original South African model because it would be an import.  Clearly, journalism in southern Africa is regressing and autocracy, dictatorship and downright political bullying are on the ascendancy.

It is time that the journalists' unions, SADC and the African Union stood up for good public broadcasting, community-based journalism, union-based self-regulation and the good old values of democracy.

                                                                   Today's thoughtTo preserve the freedom of the human mind... and freedom of the press, every spirit should be ready to devote itself to martyrdom; for as long as we may think as we will and speak as we think, the condition of man will proceed in improvement.'

                                               -Thomas Jefferson to William Green Munford, 1799.