It wasn’t supposed to happen in the new South Africa, the country of Nelson Mandela that in the 1990s came to symbolise hope, resilience and the ”long walk to freedom”, an indelible inspiration to the entire world.
No, it wasn’t supposed to happen anymore, preventing a newspaper from publishing a story about potential lawbreaking by the powers that be, about the government, its ruling political party and a favoured company.
Specifically, the journalists had discovered that, just before the general elections last year, substantial taxpayer funds from state-owned oil company PetroSA apparently went to the African National Congress by way of a private company called Imvume Management.
It is ill-fated because now the whole world is watching South Africa and Oilgate. The Economist called the censorship ”ominous” and the Freedom of Expression Institute, based in Canada, said: ”The story is a matter of serious public interest, as allegations have been made concerning the improper use of taxpayers’ money to bolster the ruling party during the run-up to national elections. It is clear that in this instance, the right to freedom of expression of the newspaper should outweigh the right to privacy and dignity of Imvume, as the matter concerns an abuse of public funds.”
Fortunately, clumsy attempts to suppress inconvenient truths usually backfire (as they did last week when the gag was lifted). There is an exciting, global right-to-know movement today and 50 countries, a quarter of the world, have enacted access-to-information laws in the past decade.
Eternal vigilance by citizens, including journalists, is absolutely necessary to both stem official corruption at the highest levels and protect basic civil liberties and freedoms that we almost take for granted sometimes, as has been painfully discovered anew in the United States.
In the world’s oldest living democracy, we have seen 300 rollbacks of the Freedom of Information Act within the first six months following September 11 2001, and since then seen 20 journalists arrested in 2003 and 15 reporters with proper credentials deported last year.
The last time ”prior restraint” happened to the Mail & Guardian was about two decades ago. The last time political news reporting was banned at the highest levels in the US was in 1971, during the Vietnam War, just before the notorious Watergate break-in and subsequent, wide-ranging scandal that culminated in the only resignation of a sitting US president, Richard Nixon, in US history.
Two newspapers, The New York Times and The Washington Post, each began publishing a leaked, secret Defence Department history of the Vietnam War that dramatically revealed government deception and incompetence. The Nixon administration went into federal court against the two news organisations, separately and, citing national security and charging treason, managed to halt publication of the ”Pentagon Papers” until the US Supreme Court, on June 30 1971 sided with the First Amendment by a vote of 6-3.
While Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee was, among others, understandably exultant and relieved, he also recognised that he had just stared into the abyss: ”For the first time in the history of the American republic, newspapers had been restrained by the government from publishing a story — a black mark in the history of democracy … What the hell was going on in this country that this could happen?”
To finish the flashback, the Pentagon Papers episode was just the beginning. Two days before the historic Supreme Court case, the whistleblower who had leaked the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg, was indicted on federal charges of conspiracy, espionage, theft of government property and the unauthorised possession of ”documents and writing related to the national defence”. The day after the high court decision, White House special counsel Charles Colson asked former CIA operative E Howard Hunt whether ”we should go down the line to nail the guy [Ellsberg] cold”.
The Pentagon Papers obsession spawned the White House Special Investigations Unit, the infamous ”Plumbers” unit, that broke into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, looking for dirt. The poisonous paranoia extended to other burglaries, including the Democratic Party national headquarters at the Watergate complex, electronic surveillance, misuse of confidential tax return information against perceived political enemies, mail fraud, obstruction of justice and an astonishing array of other illegal government abuses of power, all ultimately exposed and prosecuted by the courageous, independent, federal judiciary.
The Pentagon Papers case and the Watergate scandal still represent US history’s high-water mark in the long-standing struggle between raw political power and democratic values, poignantly affirming the public’s right to know about its government. They still represent the bleakest moments and the loftiest triumphs of journalism in contemporary America.
In South Africa today, the official response to all of the recent ethical embarrassments is breathtaking in its non-responsiveness and defiant hostility. How can the new South Africa promote foreign investment and tourism, new business opportunities including the very important, laudable ideal of increased black economic empowerment, when there is increasing evidence of favouritism toward perceived ”ANC companies”?
The company in the Oilgate scandal, Imvume, brags in its brochures of its closeness to top ANC officials, overtly stating it has ”access and influence on economic policy”.
It is illuminating that the ANC has threatened to sue the M&G over its coverage of the Oilgate scandal, its attorneys actually positing publicly that ”our clients are not obliged to discuss donations received … We record, however, that our clients deny any insinuation that they acted in any corrupt, illegal or improper manner.”
In other words, it wants to keep the public in the dark about the sources of its funding, and will threaten litigation if anyone actually succeeds in identifying their identities or their possible quid pro quo agendas.
Finally, the Freedom of Expression Institute noted: ”It is troubling that a court would attack the sacrosanct principle of confidentiality of sources in this manner, and also smacks of intimidation as the court was effectively threatening the newspaper to reveal its sources, or risk serious financial hardship.”
In the past month, the US and the world has learned the identity of ”Deep Throat”, possibly the most famous confidential source in contemporary history, more than three decades after the fact. The Washington Post reporters who wrote more than 400 stories about the Watergate scandal, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, could not have unveiled the truth about the arrogance of unbridled power without confidential sources.
No ostensibly democratic nation-state should ever attempt to infringe upon the right of citizens, including journalists, to talk to anyone they please, any time.
Comparing episodes in history directly with today is always perilous and imprecise enough in the same country, let alone across oceans.
So let’s not go there literally. But let us also not forget George Santayana’s famous advice: ”Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Charles Lewis is president of the Washington-based Fund for Independence in Journalism, and founder of the international watchdog organisation, the Centre for Public Integrity. He is an international associate to the Open Democracy Advice Centre in South Africa