Tangeni Amupadhi The dismissal of the Namibian Broadcasting Corporation’s (NBC) news boss for a report calling a Zimbabwean opposition leader “charismatic” has fuelled fears that the Namibian government is seeking to clamp down on press freedom. Nora Appolus was fired as controller of news and current affairs last week and demoted to manager for training.
The Media Institute of Southern Africa (Misa), a Southern African press freedom organisation based in Windhoek, has called for Appolus’s reinstatement, saying she was ejected from her post for political reasons.
The new chair of the NBC board, Uazuva Kaumbi, who ordered Appolus’s demotion, has let it be known Namibia’s ruling party was unhappy with Appolus’s “lax control” of the news reporters. Kaumbi said at a press conference it was unacceptable that the NBC continued to report positively about the Zimbabwean opposition, Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) “even after they had lost the elections”. Kaumbi, a loyalist of Swapo, which unconditionally supported President Robert Mugabe’s party during the recent election, claims Appolus was removed in terms of a “structural realignment” of the public broadcaster. Apart from calling the MDC’s Morgan Tsvangirai charismatic, Appolus says Kaumbi told her government leaders were unhappy with “the way Swapo was being portrayed” and for reporting about cracks in cans of pilchard. President Sam Nujoma has described media reports about the potential health risks of defective tins of fish as “economic sabotage” and promised to deal with the saboteurs.
Kaumbi admitted to issuing Appolus with a “personal reprimand” over reports describing Tsvangirai as charismatic and because of the “fish story”, but denied saying Swapo leaders had expressed disquiet about her reports. “I did not talk to her about the content of the news … but as a corporation we don’t want to use epithets [such as charismatic],” said Kaumbi, who was appointed to the NBC board in June. He repeated his unhappiness with the way in which Appolus was leading her news team in a meeting held before Appolus was fired last week.
‘She must [have] exercise[d] more control of the news team. A controller is supposed to control the news. We expect the controller to be there when television and radio news is compiled,” he said. The new five-member NBC board, which will be staffed with two government permanent secretaries (directors general) and an army colonel, also announced it had formed an executive committee that will meet once a week “instead of once a month or two months as the previous boards used to”. Kaumbi said the NBC Act gave powers to the board to “manage and control” the affairs of the corporation. However, the Act stipulates that the board, which is appointed by the minister of information and broadcasting, should oversee policy matters. All members of the new board are to have close links with Swapo.
The NBC board says the “restructuring” is aimed at making the organisation “lean and mean”. However, Appolus was the only person to be demoted and replaced.
Appolus describes herself as a “Swapo child”. She was born to a decorated Swapo leader, Putuse Appolus, in exile where she lived in Angola, Tanzania and Zambia. She trained as a journalist in Algeria and worked for 10 years at Radio France International, before returning to Namibia after independence in 1990.
“Nora [Appolus] has got a sense of professionalism despite her political [ties to Swapo],” said a colleague. “She stood by her people [journalists] on several stories, and there is no doubt she was demoted because of political control,” he said. Appolus is challenging the demotion in the labour court.
The government has criticised the independent media in Namibia as racist and imperialist, and has promised to clamp down on journalists in government-funded media who dare to report news deemed to be negative of the government.