SADC doesn’t get it about people’s rights

THIS week Police in Swaziland arrested a man for making photocopies of an article in a South African newspaper that detailed a royal sex scandal which had shaken the small kingdom.

A plainclothes police officer overheard the man requesting photocopies of an article about an alleged love affair between the country’s justice minister and one of King Mswati III’s wives and charged him for copyright violation.
Subsequently the police raided the home of the man to find the original article.
In Swaziland the king remains the law, and political organisations have been outlawed since 1973.
Last week South African ace investigative reporter Mzilikazi wa Africa of Sunday Times was arrested for possession of what police said was a fraudulent letter of resignation from Mpumalanga Premier David Mabuza to President Jacob Zuma.
That was three days after he broke a story about the rental of new police headquarters at a cost of N$500 million without following the usual tender procedures.
These are but two incidents which show the disrespect governments in southern Africa have towards the freedom of expression of their people.
Back home in Namibia, spying on others has reached peak fever in recent months.
This after Parliament passed the Information and Communications Bill last year.
The Minister of Information described the bill, which became an Act, as "progressive and popular in the eyes of many people" and even said Namibia had been commended internationally.
According to him the Act will have many benefits – chief among them the safety and security of the country and the protection of its citizens.
The Minister also told the Swapo party newspaper, Namibia Today, that "the requirement for a warrant to conduct interception is an absolute necessity based on the law that gives the right to intercept".
In short, any interception of information was to go through the court.
That, however, has not been the case in the past few months.
Many people I have spoken to have been tapped and they, like me, do not believe that there have been any warrant issued by a court.
What concerns me most is that the interception of information has picked up after discussions around the succession debate in the ruling party intensified.
This while the proponents of the bill argued that the main intention behind the interception was to curtail cyber-crime and terrorism. Critics always disputed this.
Various Swapo leaders have ‘spies’ in the country’s intelligence service and such people work around the clock to monitor the activities of others and feed them with information.
It has reached a stage where so-called comrades do not trust each other, cannot say certain things over telephones or on cellphones, and have ‘invented’ vocabulary to avoid the intelligence picking up on their discussions through ‘key’ words.
How such interceptions benefit the country, I have yet to comprehend.
What worries me most is that there seems to be no watchdog for those who watch others (or listen to the conversations of others) and information they pick up generally spreads like a veld fire among a smaller clique of friends but also reach those who were not supposed to be privy!
I have heard of an incident where one person sent an e-mail to another but it was intercepted and shared with the subject of discussion. The subject of discussion promptly replied to the sender and left the comrade in a state of shock.
Worst of all, the person did not hide the fact about the source of the leaked information and informed the comrade that he/she had ‘boys’ in intelligence!
All the above cases are a direct result of laws enacted by SADC governments under the pretext of peace, safety and security.
There can be no reference to democracy in the same breath as safety and security, or so we have learnt through experiences of citizens and journalists in the region.
And it all started with a symptomatic silence on who ought to challenge such behaviour by our governments.
When challenged by civil society and the media, the majority of the governments resort to the tired old clichés of declaring those who criticise such moves as unpatriotic while they continue to bully them.
I hope that as the leaders reflect on 30 years of SADC’s existence, some sanity will prevail and there will be time to ponder about the disrespect some of the member countries have shown towards protocols and declarations they are signatory to such as the one on culture, information and sport which, among others, commit them to the free flow of information and the freedom and independence of the media.
Sidestepping this will once again give others a licence to continue acting at will.

* This column first appeared in The Namibian