A campaign of reasonable men

The following article was published online by Times Live

With so many words written about the perils of the Protection of Information Bill, it is only fair that I should add my congratulations to the ANC for backing down from its uncompromising defence of the original Draconian draft.

But the war is not yet won. The ANC did not relent on every point, and the detail of its concessions last Friday will need to be combed for remaining devils.

What the ANC did allow was that the number of institutions entitled to create secrets was likely to be slashed in the next draft. Courts will not be required to impose minimum prison sentences for unlawful disclosure of those secrets, there will be provision for appeal to a retired judge rather than a serving cabinet minister, and the ANC might ask President Jacob Zuma to submit the final text to the Constitutional Court for ratification before he signs it.

The ANC still opposes a right for whistleblowers to argue against conviction under the new law on the grounds that their actions were in the public interest. We don’t know whether courts will be given the option of imposing a fine rather than imprisonment. We don’t yet have a definition of the “national security” that will underpin classification, and we don’t know whether the extension of a right to classify to bodies other than security and intelligence structures will be subject to review.

Luwellyn Landers, leader of the ANC delegation on the multiparty ad hoc committee of parliament processing the bill, conceded privately after announcing the concessions that he had previously defended some provisions of the secrecy bill with deep personal misgivings.

Asked whether he still had reservations, he said: “I’m a hell of a lot happier than I was when we first started consideration of this bill.”
One might ask why he is only saying that now. I suspect political opportunism is a big part both of his decision to stay quiet before and to speak up now.
That’s politics. DA members also cannot repudiate policies formally adopted by the party’s caucus without risking their jobs.

Kader Asmal, who died last week, was regarded by many as a guardian of the ANC’s morals. The cartoonist Zapiro depicted him as its compass, pointing towards the much-ignored right thing to do. Yet Asmal claimed only long after he had resigned as an MP that he had done so because he would not vote for the dissolution of the Scorpions investigating unit.
He did not resign over what I would consider the much more important issue of then president Thabo Mbeki’s murderous Aids denialism. Nor did he quit in protest against the corruption he spoke out about so frequently after he had moved back to academia.

We might like to believe politicians are drawn to the job by idealism, but it is a job. It pays the mortgage and school fees. And there’s not much out there for politicians who burn bridges behind them and leave their contacts on the far side of the Rubicons they cross. That the u-turn on the information bill finally happened was, I believe, because of two forces.

One was the rearguard campaign of reasonable men and women inside the ANC who feared its impact on the free flow of information. Enough people have pointed to Kgalema Motlanthe, the deputy president, as the driving force for me to believe he probably was. But his staff decline to comment on that, so I cannot confirm it.

I don’t know whether that internal dissent would have been voiced anyway, but I am quite sure it would not have succeeded without the second force, which was the combined pressure of two or three very committed opposition MPs and a rising crescendo of opposition from civil society in South Africa and abroad.

I say “two or three” because the ACDP, which has only three MPs, let Steve Swart prioritise the fight for freedom of expression and the DA, richer with 67 seats, deployed dogged former journalist Dene Smuts to fight the cause.

The eccentric Mario Abrosini, one of 18 IFP members, popped in regularly to speak with dramatic passion and made several excellent contributions, but he wasn’t there for all the big fights. It was a close call, however, and there is much still to be done.

Everyone who helped to turn this debate around needs to stay focussed when the committee gets back to work towards the end of July to ensure that the promise of reason is delivered, and we end up with a law with which we can live and prosper.