CGF ARTICLES, OPINIONS & EDITORIALS

Secrecy Bill: Could this article become outlawed? (2013-04-29)

February 20, 2015  3570  3570   

The decades of oppression, and the passing of racist and class laws in South Africa were all mechanisms used to keep the vast majority of people uninformed, uneducated and removed from information which caused countless suffering and long term damage to our country and her people.

The outspokenness of stalwarts such as Steve Biko, Beyers Naude, Nelson Mandela, Helen Suzman, Oliver Tambo, Archbishop Desmond Tutu including many other notable brave struggle heros all stood for a common goal; freedom.  Whilst their approach to liberate our country was often unorthodox, these citizens knew the importance of liberation and that in order to set the country free from its shackles of apartheid, every citizen had to have the same basic rights -- now espoused in the Bill of Rights.  Through exercising these rights, every citizen would be free to express themselves and citizens would be entitled to enjoy a Constitution where everyone is treated on a fair and equitable basis (instead of oppression, segregation and racial discrimination).  These were in essence the principles for which many people sacrificed their lives.  And as countless, brave citizens stood steadfast in these rights -- against the might of an unsympathetic, racist, arrogant and classist white dominated Nationalist party government -- these citizens eventually crushed the stronghold of oppression in 1994 and delivered all the people of South Africa a democracy that has become renowned across the world. 

And so the approval of the ‘Secrecy Bill’ (known as the Protection of State Information Bill) last week by Parliament into legislation is not only bizarre, but it is also completely ironic and has been poorly governed since it was first introduced almost five years ago.  The people who fought the liberation battle over decades, and who were eventually rewarded to become the new leaders of South Africa, are now the same people responsible for outlawing various freedoms pertaining to the access of certain information. 

There’s a danger when a government refuses to listen to its people, and South Africa has first hand knowledge and experience of the consequences as found in some of the social uprisings such as;

• the anti-pass law campaign launched by the Pan-Africanist Congress in Sharpeville in 1960, 
• the labour militancy and strikes in Durban in 1973, 
• the 1976 Soweto June uprisings led by black high school students protesting against the introduction of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction in local black schools,
• the hunger strikes by political prisoners in 1989 resulting in the release of hundreds of detainees placed in detention without trial,
• the 2012 Marikana mining strikes and subsequent clashes with police,
• the 2013 farm worker’s strikes in De Doorns, and
• the more recent stand-off between the teachers’ union SADTU and the government.