Lift The Ban And Let Democracy Be The Victor

I HOPE the penny drops in the Swapo hierarchy and President Hifikepunye Pohamba decides to lift the advertising and purchase ban the Government imposed on The Namibian almost 10 years ago.

The President must realise that it is the sensible thing to do and that Cabinet made an error.

Cabinet banned the paper on December 5 2000 with claims that the newspaper was hostile towards Government and too critical of its policies .

They were soon followed by the likes of the Swapo Party and its youth league, National Youth Council as well as many Government-sponsored agencies.

The decision was of an arbitrary nature and violated people’s right to information.

At the time many defenders of press freedom and freedom of expression urged The Namibian to take the matter to court.

In fact, in Botswana, where that country’s government instituted a similar ban on Botswana Guardian and MidWeek Sun, there was a court challenge and the move was declared unconstitutional.

Editor Gwen Lister chose not to take the same route although the paper would have won the case hands down.

She believed, among other things, that challenging and winning against the Government would have been used against the paper by some who would then have bolstered their argument that The Namibian needed Government and couldn’t maintain its independence.

Although it was the democratic right of former President Sam Nujoma, his Cabinet or any other citizen of Namibia to criticise or take issue with the newspaper itself or its independent editorial stance, or for that matter, not to read and/or advertise in The Namibian if they chose not to do so, the ban was an indictment against our professed democracy and certainly a blot on the Government’s press freedom record since Independence.

And if the ban is lifted, there must be no illusion that it will influence the newspaper’s way of reporting. The tradition of the past 25 years must continue.

The Namibian has a role to play and an independent and responsible press can only benefit the country.

The past 10 years have been trying times in terms of penetrating several key markets but the newspaper has at no stage depended on either Government advertising or its purchases for survival.

Therefore lifting the ban will also not mean that the Government will be subsidising the paper in any way.

In fact, when the ban was announced almost 10 years ago Government advertising accounted for just over six per cent of the paper’s total advertising revenue; and newspaper sales to Government were around 400 per day.

In 2001 the paper’s circulation was around 26 000 copies per day, based on sales figures for Fridays.

At the moment that figure has surpassed 40 000 and readership surveys have estimated that up to 17 people read one copy of the newspaper in northern Namibia.

This shows that any adverts Government places in the newspaper will be for the sole purpose of reaching the readers of The Namibian, which has the biggest daily national audience. The purchase of the newspaper by Government, likewise, will be done so that officials can inform themselves of what is happening in the country.

The Namibian survived the apartheid era, made the transition from pre-independence donor dependency to a position of financial viability and has clearly shown that it have overcome what many thought would be a major economic obstacle.

It is more than just a newspaper and its business model is one of very few success stories in Namibia.

As Lister put it at the newspaper’s 25th anniversary celebration last month, The Namibian thrives on a “solid work ethic, commitment and a feeling of ownership in what we do”.

Over the past 10 years the paper has put back into the community no less than N$15 million through sponsorships of the Newspaper Cup football tournament, a fully subsidised weekly Youthpaper, which targets the youth of our country in an attempt to empower and uplift them, and various other projects. The same cannot be said about many companies run and owned by so-called comrades.

If the ban is lifted, it will show that democracy, and not The Namibian, will be the victor and that Cabinet has matured beyond the stage of ‘struggle politics’. Press freedom, and more importantly an independent press, are vital to the wellbeing of any democracy.