Are we journalists getting it right over the secrecy bill?

Some years ago a duo of editors from SA, heavy African Renaissance advocates, travelled to Ghana for an African Union summit. Their brief was more or less to impress on African leaders the necessity for press freedom in the United States of Africa being discussed at the time.

The leaders gave them short thrift. They would not even see them. The editors meekly submitted and went off to their five-star hotels again with their tails between their legs. When they’re not going on about Africa’s purported imperial history or the evils of eurocentrism, they are actually nice people, so I felt sorry for them.

Like my colleagues I wore black last Tuesday when the secrecy bill was adopted by Parliament. But I had to wonder over the self-centredeness of the media reaction. As SA gets closer to becoming just another African state, I was reminded of the failed Ghana expedition, and that your average African leader or ruling party of the day, doesn’t worry much about the press.

SA’s press is one of our saving graces, I have to hasten to confirm. I am just stating an easily observable fact when I claim that corruption and tyranny would have been much more advanced had it not been for us, the media, and our freedom of information-biased constitution.

The tragedy of the contested provisions of the secrecy bill is part of the broader ANC tragedy, of a liberation movement steadily reversing its pioneering work on entrenching a rights culture in African society, for the sake of some fantasy future imperium riding on the coattails of authoritarian models such as China.

So I am not moved by the ANC’s counterargument that few states have a public interest override in their intelligence legislation. The point is, we have lost yet another opportunity to show the way in developing such unique measures.

But perhaps we should listen to the ANC when it says it is not trying to curtail press freedom. That is to say, its preoccupations lie elsewhere. Of course, unintended consequences can be just as dire as intended ones, so this is little consolation.

However, ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe spelled it out when he talked of the dangers for the party of the many leakages from members doubling up as state officials, who use these in the now all but officially confirmed internal power struggle in the party.

Recall the hoax e-mail saga, and browse through Frank Chikane’s near-comical accounts of his time as presidential office manager, and one simply has to factor in the difficulties encountered by the party and its extensions into the state in identifying true data from false. Paranoia rules in the ANC, that’s for sure.

Part of the problem is the total revolution we are undergoing when it comes to information and communication. I am reading a fascinating account of this by Massachusetts robotics professor Sherry Turkle, in her book Together Alone. It is true most of her thorough research focuses on adolescents, but the ANC is acting rather like one, isn’t it?

One of the general sources of anxiety among America’s teenagers, the ones who have grown up online, is the internet’s feature of recording anything and everything an online-dwelling person does. Turkle says adolescents have to have the freedom to act and say things that are relatively consequence free, as they experiment in finding their individual identities.

However, the opposite happens with constant texting and multitasking. Teenagers can also be extremely nasty to their rival peers, and so one’s messages, once recorded somewhere on the internet, can quickly run out of your control should they get copied, often by total strangers. So teenagers spend a great deal of their time stressing over the right wording for their next text.

Judging from Chikane’s ramblings, the political teenagers in the ANC are struggling with the same sort of problem. That’s actually why have earnest and staid commissions of inquiry into reams of mostly frivolous material such as e-mails.

Of course, if this motivation for the secrecy bill were true, it would beg the question whether the bill can bring order into the chaos. And it raises the possibility of  a 1984-type surveillance culture in the ANC, in which cadres spend huge amounts of taxpayers time peering over one another’s shoulders or trawling e-mail databases. In such a scenario, show trials of the Soviet type cannot be far off.

Such an outcome would actually be worse than just your ordinary clampdown on the media. So here’s hoping the ANC is gunning for us journalists, and not for itself.