Campaign against secrecy is ready for action

Right2Know is ready for the coming fight, write Sithembile Mbete and Alison Tilley

SO WHAT is the state of secrecy in SA? Is it winning? You might think so, given news over the past few weeks. The Presidency is appealing against the Supreme Court of Appeal order that the Khampepe-Moseneke report be released, the SABC won’t say what it paid its CEO to go away, and a group of nongovernmental organisations has been refused access to a report determining ways to draw private sector mining companies in Gauteng into the process of extracting mine water and cleaning it.

Volunteers’ statistics had to be used to diagnose an increase in the number of attacks on hikers and bikers on Table Mountain, because neither SANParks nor the police had released statistics on the situation. Had the statistics been available, and police and volunteer patrols directed to the hot spots, a significant percentage of the crimes might have been prevented.

Is there good news? The Protection of Information Bill has lost momentum. An extension of the life span of the ad hoc parliamentary committee dealing with the bill has been ordered by the speaker of Parliament, but with Parliament in recess, MPs will have to wait to approve the extension retrospectively. The bill is the subject of consternation in the ruling party. Inexperienced law advisers allocated to the committee are battling to put the policy suggestions of the ruling party into a sensible draft.

Meanwhile, the Right2Know campaign has had its first national meeting and is fighting fit, with its members committing themselves to campaign for more than just stopping the bill, but more transparency from the public and private sectors. Issues with the bill remain at the forefront of the campaign — the committee has been presented with the public bodies that would be able to classify information. The bill proposes that the head of any organ as defined would have the power to classify documents and anyone who violated secrecy would be liable to imprisonment without the option of a fine. According to the list, the bill would give the power to declare secrets to at least 1001 institutions, including universities, state-owned companies such as Eskom, Johannesburg City Parks, the Brakpan Bus Company, Rotondo Walnuts, Artscape, the Ugu District Municipality and the Voortrekker Museum.

With local government elections coming up, the presence of municipalities on this list is of concern. Secrecy is already pervasive in this sphere. At the Right2Know meeting, community activists shared their experiences of the difficulty they have in obtaining information from municipalities related to service delivery issues. This bill threatens to make it even harder for communities to obtain vital information. Secrecy should be limited to core state bodies in the security sector, such as the police, defence and intelligence agencies.

This is not the least of the problems with the bill. Although the removal of commercial information as a category of information that may be classified has been agreed, and the definition of national security has been reconsidered, the bill remains unacceptable.

Particularly egregious is the idea that those who receive classified information that is released by whistle-blowers, will be penalised. The media will be most heavily penalised by this provision. The committee has failed to agree on the inclusion of a public interest defence, which would protect those who disclosed secrets in the public interest.

Also problematic is the lack of an independent oversight mechanism to review classification decisions. In the current version of the bill, the minister of state security is the final arbiter of decisions about what may be secret.

In the run-up to local government elections, Right2Know will highlight the access to information struggles of communities all over the country to illustrate that pervasive state secrecy already negatively affects the lives of ordinary South Africans. As the members of the committee assist their parties in campaigning for the elections, they should be aware that the bill they are deliberating on threatens to compromise their ability to deliver on their election promises.

– Tilley is Executive Director at the Open Democracy Advice Centre. Mbete is a political researcher at Idasa

Source: BusinessDay Online.