Saturday sees the world celebrate World Media Freedom Day. It’s because May 3 was adopted by the UN General Assembly in recognition of the historic Windhoek Declaration on press freedom, drawn up by African journalists back in 1991.
This year, media people could take a leaf out of Zambian experience, where an alliance of actors is painstakingly working to promote a society where freedoms of expression and information will be entrenched in both law and society.
Spearheading their innovative efforts is the independent daily, The Post. Started as a weekly in 1991 by Fred M’membe, the publication has survived tough times through sheer doggedness and bravery.
The editor-owner is known for surviving repression when he opposed Kenneth Kaunda’s one-party regime, and when he hammered successor president Frederick Chiluba — whom he branded a ”twit” on the front page.
M’membe is also a major entrepreneur. When state-owned printers favoured the country’s state-newspapers, he raised resources for a massive full-colour press. When transport operators struggled to deliver the paper outside of Lusaka, he set up a courier company that is now reckoned to be second only to DHL in Zambia.
The Post was also one of the earliest African papers to go online… and go temporarily offline when it became the first in the world to have an online edition banned (courtesy of the Chiluba presidency).
It is not a surprise therefore that many of the current press freedom activities in Zambia owe their existence to M’membe. In particular, he is quite possibly the only media owner in Africa who takes a profit cut in order to employ two fulltime people on his staff with the mission of promoting press freedom.
One of them is Sheikh Chifuwe, a senior journalist since The Post‘s first year, and a man who once sneaked into the Democratic Republic of Congo for some really daring journalism.
At the time, Chiluba was blocking Kaunda from campaigning for office on the grounds that the man’s parents had been Malawian. Chifuwe dug up hospital records from Lumbubashi that showed that, irony of ironies, Chiluba himself had been born in the Congo.
Clasping the evidence, Chifuwe slipped across the border in the early hours in order to avoid Zambian intelligence pursuers and successfully bring the story back home.
The Post‘s press freedom activities that Chifuwe heads up today are less dramatic, but they still show a lot of enterprise.
For a start, he has successfully put together a broad-based media alliance to run campaigns, including a thrust for renewed impetus around a long-stalled Freedom of Information Act.
The Zambian government put the draft legislation on ice some years ago. At the time, the legislature did pass two sister laws designed to create an independent broadcast regulator, and an independent public broadcaster. But the executive went on to shamelessly sabotage their implementation ever since.
The alliance assembled by Chifuwe includes the Zambian chapter of the Media Institute of Southern Africa (Misa), and while the state-broadcaster isn’t involved, at least journalists from the major state-owned newspapers are. Building relations across that chasm is no small achievement — and the results have already shown in persuading government to drop a plan to tax reading materials.
Most recently, in trying to re-start the legislation for the right to information, the coalition has been holding public functions, as well as setting up one-on-one meetings with key Members of Parliament and cabinet ministers to correct misconceptions.
The need for such law is evident from a recent experience by Chifuwe’s colleague on the committee, Leah Komakoma Kabanda. Officials told her that she would have to write in for permission to receive a list of the community radio stations which the government has licensed. Hardly a matter that should be a state secret.
The campaign around Freedom of Information received a boost at the start of the year when President Levy Mwanamwasa spoke out in support of passing the law.
But the Minister responsible for taking this forward is trying to link it to statutory regulation for print media ethics. His reasoning is that he wants to ensure that the media won’t ”abuse” access to official information.
Chifuwe and colleagues retort that whereas journalistic ethic issues concern the media, the right to information is relevant to the wider society. An example is its appeal to anyone interested in combating corruption in the allocation of Zambia’s burgeoning mining concessions.
The press freedom activists want the two issues de-linked. If they can get the information law passed as a separate issue, then it will be on to the next challenge: fending off statutory regulation.
The Zambian activists are building press freedom bit by bit, and with strong employer backing and a broad-based momentum.