President Jacob Zuma of South Africa has started drafting laws to curtail media freedom.
Here we go! South Africa had its “golden age” whilst Nelson Mandela was President; his was a steady hand on the helm when the nation was negotiating turbulent times out of the darkness of apartheid. He laid a strong foundation for a free and democratic SA complete with all the checks and balances. The rainbow nation was buoyant with confidence and self belief. Sadly instead of building on what he left his successors have been dismantling Mandela’s work brick by brick.
Whilst President Mandela was a man of vision who truly understood the importance and value of a free press in a democracy his successors see it as a threat. President Zuma, like President Mbeki before him, is not a clever man – forget the vision bit – and when he was elevated into a position of power and authority he should have surrounded himself with advisors. He is not smart enough to admit his own short coming and so did the exact opposite started behaving as if he is Mr Know-It-All. Setting himself up for ridicule when he falls and it is the democratic duty of the media to do just that!
President Mbeki made a complete idiot of himself with his Smart Alec theories on HIV and AIDS.
President Zuma’s attitude on AIDS was not much better than Mbeki; he knowingly had sex with some one who was HIV positive and believed taking a shower afterwards was enough to stop him getting the virus. Ever since that admission the Cartoonist, Zapiro, has depicted him with a camel-like hump growing on the back of his head feeding a shower head fixed over his head.
President Zuma had a simple choice; surround himself with expert advisors and cover for his own intellectual shortcomings or else muzzle the media to stop them revealing his many blunders. In true African leader style, he choice to do the later!
"Why was it (the Media) surprised by the explosion of national pride during the Soccer World Cup tournament?” fired President Zuma. “Why did South Africans decide to rise above the daily diet of negativity and defeatism that they are fed daily in the media?”
President Zuma claims he wants a serious nation debate on press freedom. If he meant it then he should have picked a burning national issue and not a trivial one. The presence of millions of foreigners in SA today is something that touches a raw nerve of millions of South Africans, for example. For a month after the WC the Police and Army were on standby in case there was a repeat of the xenophobic violence against foreigner that swept SA last year. As long as millions of foreigners remain in SA the threat of fresh attacks will always remain. The Media has played a constructive role of informing the public of President Zuma’s repeated failure to deal with Mugabe and thus deal with underlying cause forcing millions of Zimbabweans to leave their own country.
The only “negativity and defeatism” the media raised about the WC was to ask whether SA will put the state-of-the-art new stadiums costing billions of Rands to build to good use after the WC? That is a legitimate question to ask. Indeed now with the euphoria of the WC wearing off millions of South Africans are already asking the same question.
Agreed, there should have been a serious national debate on whether or not SA should have hosted WC BEFORE the stadiums were built. Still, a vigorous debate now will help stop a similar mistake being made in future!
Even if some of the media had gone over the top in their criticism of the WC still President Zuma has ample opportunity to say so; his move to muzzle the media is definitely an over kill on his part.
President Zuma is taking SA down the same ruinous path that many African countries have travelled the path everyone thought President Mandela had done so much to ensure SA would not go. President Zuma like dictators like Mugabe would swear they believe in freedom of expression although in practise they, as leaders, also have the right to tell everyone else to shut up and to muzzle the media.
2 comments:
@Erich Goosen, Raia wa Afrika, Jan Hofmeyr and Atlas Reader
You have said all that can be said about just how ineffective SADC is and usueless President Zuma has been on resolving the Zimbabwe problem.
Prime Minister Tsvangirai's failure to put Mugabe on the spot has not helped either. At the end of the day we have to accept that President Zuma and SADC were there to help push for change but Tsvangirai had to lead the charge. By the same token the international community have not pushed for change in Zimbabwe because SADC said Zimbabwe was an African problem and they wanted to deal with it only to do nothing.
The scrapping of the Z$ did solve Zimbabwe's run away inflation but that can hardly be considered "progress" since the GNU has done nothing to put the economy back on track. Up to 80% of Zimbabweans are unemployed and live in abject poverty. Are these people supposed to settle for this?!
African leaders love to get together and talk nonsense, eat and talk some more nonsense. "Our region has established a strong democratic culture, in which a political transition is regularly achieved through the ballot box," by Namibian President Hifikepunye Pohamba.
The truth is most people in SADC countries are in a worse economic situation than they were thirty years ago. The countries’ rich resources have wasted through mismanagement and corruption leaving the majority facing a life of abject poverty and despair. On the political front most people have yet to enjoy the human rights and dignity other people round the world take for granted.
It is physically impossible to shake one’s hand with the other but judging by the ease African leaders have repeated distort the truth of regression to talk of progress and talk of freedom when there is oppression; the can just as easily contort to shake their left hand with the right!
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