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Cape Town - On Thursday afternoon MPs will vote the secrecy bill into law. That cannot be changed because the ANC, as majority party, supports the bill and has the overwhelming majority of seats in the National Assembly.
The proper name of the secrecy bill is of course the protection of state information bill and the object of the act is very clear: “to regulate the manner in which state information may be protected”.
This “manner” includes a big stick - jail terms of between 10 years and 25 years for various offences (most of which legitimately involve foreign interests).
One example of how the bill may affect South Africans in future is that it’s highly likely that episodes similar to the Central African Republic disaster, where 13 soldiers died, may in future be suppressed by government.
Any information that gets out around issues like that could in future put the journalists involved in jail for 20 years.
And any more reporting on Nkandla is best forgotten.
It appears that the vote is being rushed through at the moment.
Colleagues wrote in Die Burger this week that there wasn’t even enough time to check for punctuation in the document - and we all know in a legal bill of this magnitude what a difference a comma makes.
The chairperson of the ad hoc committee looking into the bill told the committee members, according to the newpaper, that there’s no need for an obsessesion “with perfection”.
Opposition parties maintain it’s unconstitutional and illegal for security departments to regulate information.
So where to from here? The constitutional court seems the next stop. Opposition parties have already told the ANC they will meet each other there.
Is Thursday’s vote the end of freedom of expression in South Africa? Time will tell.
- Fin24
*Follow James-Brent Styan on Twitter at @jamesstyan. Views expressed are his own.
The proper name of the secrecy bill is of course the protection of state information bill and the object of the act is very clear: “to regulate the manner in which state information may be protected”.
This “manner” includes a big stick - jail terms of between 10 years and 25 years for various offences (most of which legitimately involve foreign interests).
One example of how the bill may affect South Africans in future is that it’s highly likely that episodes similar to the Central African Republic disaster, where 13 soldiers died, may in future be suppressed by government.
Any information that gets out around issues like that could in future put the journalists involved in jail for 20 years.
And any more reporting on Nkandla is best forgotten.
It appears that the vote is being rushed through at the moment.
Colleagues wrote in Die Burger this week that there wasn’t even enough time to check for punctuation in the document - and we all know in a legal bill of this magnitude what a difference a comma makes.
The chairperson of the ad hoc committee looking into the bill told the committee members, according to the newpaper, that there’s no need for an obsessesion “with perfection”.
Opposition parties maintain it’s unconstitutional and illegal for security departments to regulate information.
So where to from here? The constitutional court seems the next stop. Opposition parties have already told the ANC they will meet each other there.
Is Thursday’s vote the end of freedom of expression in South Africa? Time will tell.
- Fin24
*Follow James-Brent Styan on Twitter at @jamesstyan. Views expressed are his own.
