Abstract
Free speech and good journalism are being undermined by bad laws.
One of the political consequences of the 9/11 attacks on the US has been a renewed abuse of the catch-all phrase ‘national security’. In South Africa, ‘national security’ has in recent months been bandied about to defend a clampdown on state information, which has seen a renewed application of an apartheid law and the adoption of the Protection of State Information Bill, the so-called Secrecy Bill.
Organisations such as the American Civil Liberties Union and ARTICLE 19 have warned that national security has become a convenient cloak for governments. It can be draped over anything from human rights violations to instances of incompetence. The allergic reaction to openness was most starkly exemplified by government responses to Wikileaks’ leaking of diplomatic cables. While some of the information revealed was surely embarrassing, it is not the same as endangering national security. Yet ‘embarrassment’ could jerk a complacent public into action.
In 2014, South Africa will celebrate 20 years of democracy. However, the combination of neoliberal economic policies and increasingly faltering state service delivery, along with growing corruption, has resulted in intensifying socio-economic inequality.
In recent years the government has reverted to attempts to control flows of state information in the face of an active media sector, intermittent whistleblower revelations and press leaks from different factions within the ruling African National Congress (ANC). Exposures regularly revolve around suspected or actual corruption among a political elite criticised for its ‘conspicuous consumption’.
The rise of President Jacob Zuma’s faction in the ANC marks the advent of what could be called the ‘new securocrats’. The first securocrats were associated with the rule of PW Botha and his attempts, during the 1980s, to give apartheid an acceptable face while brutally suppressing resistance. Zuma headed the ANC’s security department, Mbokodo (vernacular for ‘the stone that crushes’), during the party’s exile years. His presidential term has been marked by the resurgent influence of the security services, with party-political battles tainting the police, National Prosecuting Authority, State Security Agency and other law enforcement bodies.
The South African parliament’s adoption of the Protection of State Information Bill, dubbed the ‘Secrecy Bill’ by its opponents, demonstrates the expanding power of the State Security Agency. The agency incorporates the National Intelligence Agency and the South African Secret Service. Using national security as its cover, the bill appoints the agency as overseer of state information, whether intelligence-related or not. Access to classified state information is subject to an onerous process of applications for declassification, which could succeed or fail. If, in the face of these obstacles, an investigative journalist decides to go ahead and reveal classified information, prison sentences of up to 25 years apply if the exposé is deemed to benefit foreign interests, even if exposure was in the public interest and the journalist did not intend for his or her actions to benefit outside parties. Following pressure from civil society, a public interest clause was inserted, but it is too limited to obviate this threat.
ABOVE: Protest against the Protection of State Information Bill, 25 April 2013
Credit: Denis Farrell/AP/PA
The bill provides for a classification review panel, which can reverse decisions. But it is accountable to the parliament’s Joint Standing Committee on Intelligence, which conducts its regular meetings behind closed doors. It is the only parliamentary committee allowed to do so.
The South African parliament is implicated in another recent cover-up involving the application of the apartheid-era National Key Point Act of 1980. Revelations that the government spent some R240m (US$24.7m) on upgrades to Zuma’s private homestead, Nkandla, provoked a public firestorm. Under pressure, the government appointed a task force to investigate the expenditure, which reportedly included a gymnasium and ‘his and her bathrooms’.
The ministry of public works released a statement on the findings of the investigation, assuring the public that while irregularities were found in the appointment of service providers, there was ‘no evidence that public money was spent to build the private residence of the president’. The security upgrades amounted to R71m (US$7.3m) but the total amount spent was R206m (US$20.3m). The discrepancy was due to, among other things, the ‘operational needs’ of state departments, which came to R135m (US$1.3m). Therefore, the actual costs of the security upgrades seemingly constitute only about a third of the total amount. Documents, which the Mail and Guardian newspaper has in its possession, showed that public money was indeed spent on buildings for the private use of the Zuma family. Contradicting Zuma’s insistence that he knew nothing about the cost, City Press newspaper found proof that the opposite was true. The ministry declined to make available the task force’s full report, citing the National Key Point Act: ‘any information relating to security measures undertaken at a national key point is protected from disclosure in terms of this Act.’ From there it was only a small step to insisting that parliament hear the report behind closed doors. Again, the Joint Standing Committee on Intelligence’s unusual status as a closed committee came in handy.
Thus the National Key Point Act, an apartheid relic used at the time to obfuscate abuses of power, is again rolled out whenever the ruling elite finds itself in a fix. If any doubt existed over whether this was the case, the recent ‘Guptagate’ scandal made it crystal clear. In April 2013, a wealthy Indian family close to Zuma decided to use Waterkloof Air Force Base as entry point into South Africa for 200 guests attending their daughter’s wedding. In this, a number of the usual international protocols regarding entry into a foreign country were not adhered to. If national security was really about the protection of territorial integrity, the Gupta Airbus’s unregulated and irregular entry into the country at a military air force base close to the capital Pretoria would surely be a textbook case of a national security violation.
However – in their efforts to distance themselves as far as possible from what is surely both a cringe-worthy incident and a blatant exposure of the weakness of the state – defence, home affairs and other ministers declared that the National Key Point Act was not applicable in this case. Why? Because the ministers want their task force’s carefully orchestrated report, which exonerates them from the accusation that they breached national security, to be public. In it, the blame is shifted to two officials, guilty of committing a newly invented offence: ‘name-dropping’.
The rulers have decided: a military air force base is not a place of interest when it comes to matters of national security, while the president’s private residence is. For now, at least.