FIGHT THE DYING OF THE DEMOCRATIC LIGHT
In Zimbabwe as in South Africa the ‘bad guys’ are trying, by legislative and legal means, to stifle justice and evade accountability. If apathetic citizens allow them to succeed, the democratic project will be lost
Iwas in Namibia last week, attending a conference on information and communications rights in Africa and eating a lot of beef. Namibians are inordinately proud of their beef, though conference catering is probably not the best way to showcase it. Discussing this and useful Namibian myths with other delegates, I proffered the information that Windhoek is habitually voted Africa’s cleanest city. But when I googled that, it turned out Kigali, Rwanda, now tops the polls. A victory for dictatorships over democracies, alas. And there have been quite a few of those recently. During one of the panel sessions on digital rights and navigating the post-truth era in Africa an audience member stood up to make a contribution. He said that he could not say today the things he’d said in the sessions the day before, because Zimbabwe’s parliament had, overnight, passed a bill popularly known as the Patriotic Bill, which criminalises citizens who
“wilfully damage the sovereignty and national interest” of the country.
(The bill still has to go before the Senate, and be signed into law by the president.)
“If I sit down and have coffee with the
Namibian ambassador today,” said the audience member, “I could land up in jail.”
That’s not hyperbole. According to TimesLIVE, the Criminal Law (Codification & Reform) Amendment Bill to give its official title prohibits communication with foreign government officials when that information may “harm the country’s positive image and integrity or reputation”.
The bill also bans people from saying things that the government might feel are unpatriotic, lobbying for sanctions and trade boycotts, and attending any meetings aimed at overthrowing the government.
The Catch-22, of course, is that a government as nervous as President Emmerson “MiniBob” Mnangagwa’s sees every meeting as a threat.
Penalties include being sent to jail for 20 years, and anyone who is convicted of planning an armed intervention faces life imprisonment.
TimesLIVE quotes Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights (ZLHR) as saying the bill’s provisions are “vague, lack certainty, are imprecise, and are thus prone to abuse by law enforcement. ZLHR is gravely concerned that the bill penalises citizens and residents for merely attending a meeting where sanctions are considered, whether the sanctions target any individual or official or class of individuals.”
The audience member was Hopewell Chin’ono, a Zimbabwean journalist who speaks from bitter experience. He has been arrested, imprisoned and harassed for his work exposing corruption. In 2020, he was charged with obstructing justice and contempt of court for a tweet about the court outcome of a gold smuggling scandal that involved Mnangagwa’s niece.
In 2021, he was again arrested and charged for a tweet, and he defiantly tweeted the moment: “They say they are charging me with communicating falsehoods for tweeting that a child had been beaten up and died by a police officer! They are taking me to the Law and order section at Harare Central Police Station.”
Critics of the Patriotic Bill say it is one of the most oppressive laws yet to be passed in Zimbabwe. Elsewhere, you’ll find a comprehensive analysis of this bill, its legal ramifications, and its impact on the democratic project in Zimbabwe (see, for example, page 36). But also interesting are the sociocultural aspects: how laws such as these make citizens think about their country.
I’d intended to mail Chin’ono for permission to quote his contribution. That’s one of the chilling effects of the draconian laws designed to give states the power to quash freedom of speech, of course. Ordinarily, I’d have just included his comments made in a public arena, but that’s no longer feasible, given how extreme the retribution could be for him. As fate would
have it, we shared the same
airport shuttle a couple of days later, and I could get his permission in person.
It sounds like the start of a joke. “A Zimbabwean and a South African get into an airport shuttle in Namibia.” But the conversation wasn’t exactly lighthearted. Well, there was a bit of absurd humour, it turned out. In the course of casual conversation, we discovered that I was the inadvertent owner of a record collection that had once belonged to a relative of Ian Smith, erstwhile prime minister of Rhodesia, and Chin’ono had recently been given the remnants of Smith’s personal library from his old house in Harare. I didn’t choose to be the owner of patriotic Rhodesian folk records signed with personal messages from Smith but, hey, we all have our cross to bear.
One of the parallels between Zimbabwe and South Africa is that young people in both countries are beginning to hark back to a colonial past in a way that seems both inexplicable and indefensible. In the same way that we’ve got young South Africans saying life was better under apartheid, Zimbabwe has people who say life was better under Smith.
They’ll sneer at the fact that the Zimbabwean government would rather rename roads built by the colonists than go to the effort of building new ones. They’ll point out that the Zimbabwean government hasn’t built one single new referral hospital, and is content to just loot the ones it inherited from colonialism. And a hundred other examples you’ll be familiar with, many of which will resonate with our own experience. Zimbabwe, too, once had a national airline.
The impetus behind these statements, as with those by South Africans, isn’t really a desire to return to some idealised, prelapsarian colonial dispensation. In the main, it’s to serve as an indictment of current governments — an attempt to shame the corrupt politicians who have bled our countries dry.
South Africa has a long history — perhaps all of our democratic history — of facilitating misrule in Zimbabwe. One of the reasons for this, it has been suggested, is that South African politicians and businesspeople collaborate with their Zimbabwean counterparts on corruption.
For example — and to keep it topical — investigative outlet amaBhungane suggests that “a trove of leaked internal documents has laid bare the close ties between controversial South African businessman Zunaid Moti and Zimbabwe’s highest-ranking politicians, bringing to light evidence of dubious multimilliondollar transactions, a sustained effort to accumulate political influence, and apparent attempts to capture parts of Zimbabwe’s crumbling state”.
Moti’s recent attempts to muzzle amaBhungane by dodgy legal means echo, perhaps, the ambitions behind Zimbabwe’s Patriotic Bill. All the bad guys care about is stifling justice, and evading investigation and accountability.
It’s a truth generally acknowledged that the greatest threat to democracy is government. The second-greatest threat, though, is citizen apathy.
In a recent piece carried by Corruption Watch, William Gumede argued that “nations have dominant national psyches which determine what will be viewed as acceptable. The collective acceptance of corruption, incompetence and system decay destroys the idea of holding government and leaders accountable. Once we as a country accept these astonishingly low standards as normal from our government, the country will continue on its path to fully fledged failed state.”
Whether you buy into the failed state narrative or not, the more that states make it difficult, and dangerous, for citizens to contribute to the democratic project, the more apathetic and disempowered citizens become. That’s something we have to fight against. Citizens change governments. And that holds for democracies and dictatorships, equally.