We have a duty to protect the media
HISTORY is a great teacher. When actions are committed for which no consequence is obviously foreseeable, we can always resort to history for reference, because it is the clearest mirror to society.
The ongoing national conversation around the public spat between ANC deputy secretary-general Jessie Duarte, and eNCA journalist Samkele Maseko, has reignited an even more pertinent conversation around the role of the media in our democratic dispensation and its relationship to the public.
This conversation begs for critical engagement, not only because media freedom is one of the fundamental pillars on which our democracy rests, but because failure to protect this freedom impedes the strengthening of democracy.
One of the first things to be attacked when a country descends into chaos is the media. History is littered with examples of this.
The South African government flirted with the idea of launching a much more sophisticated attack on press freedom through the introduction of the Protection of Information Bill, commonly referred to as the Secrecy Bill.
This highly problematic piece of proposed legislation sought to regulate the classification, protection and dissemination of state information, weighing state interests against transparency and freedom of expression.
At the heart of the controversy around this bill is its failure to balance these competing principles by including provisions that undoubtedly undermine the right to access information, but perhaps more dangerously for the democratic project, the rights of whistle-blowers and journalists.
Had it been passed as it was, the bill would have ensured that atrocities such as Nkandla, state capture, the grand looting and collapse of the SA Revenue Service and the Public Investment Corporation, would have remained untold stories.
The bill was challenged by many organisations. But perhaps most pointedly, it was challenged even within the ANC.
On the occasion of its passing in Parliament, ANC MPs Ben Turok and Gloria Borman demonstrated their protest against the bill by walking out and abstaining from voting.
One of the things about the EFF that should terrify us as a society is that it has fashioned itself into a vehicle of attack against the media.
Any organisation that invests itself in consistent attacks on the media and journalists, as the EFF has done, is an organisation that must raise the ire and the fear of the public. An attack on press freedom is an attack on society as a whole.
It must concern us because the people of South Africa have tasked us with the Herculean task of safeguarding this hard-won democracy against anyone and anything that threatens it – even if such a threat arises from within.
People who protect wrong things, who applaud when our own leaders victimise journalists or betray the public interest, should not have friendship and comradeship from us.
They must be subjected to the Law of Common Purpose with the perpetrators, because evil prospers when good men and women do nothing, or when they applaud that evil.
Morifi is the Tshwane district secretary of the Young Communist League and a PhD candidate at Tshwane University of Technology