[Debate] Letter by Archbishop Thabo Makgoba on POIB

[Oliver Meth]

Protection of State Information Bill
needs Public Interest Provisions 

The
following open letter to President Jacob Zuma was issued on 27 November 2011.
It calls for him to return the Protection of State Information Bill to Cabinet,
for inclusion of an adequate public interest provision.

Dear Mr President, 

I write to you as one who grew up under
a system that oppressed and censored the media – a system that invoked fear in
anyone who dared to read, or embrace, different views to those of the
government of the day. The passage of the Protection of State Information Bill
has stirred up in me vivid memories of my time as a student in the 1980s at
Wits, and the traumatising experience of police ransacking our residence as
they looked for classified material. The undercurrent of fear running through
our lives that this created is so totally in contradiction to the open
atmosphere of constructively critical readings of our life and times which we
so much need in South Africa today. 

Of course, every country has state
secrets, and needs to classify them as such and protect them. I fully
understand this. That South Africa needs to replace the old law from apartheid
times, I also fully agree. Yet I also hear the cry that the current bill passed
this week lacks the one necessary thing, an adequate public interest clause
that relates to the criminality of those who ‘transgress’ on these grounds. I
have heard some lawyers, with politicians, argue that this is not necessary,
and that the law will not be used to penalise those who bring wrong-doing to
light. But across the journalistic world, among members of civil society and
trade unions, and in community-based and faith-based organisations, there are
wide-spread concerns at both the severe sentences, and the wide-ranging
provisions for classification of material by any organ of state. These have the
potential to create an atmosphere similar to repressive apartheid censorship,
and thereby gag the truth; hide corruption; conceal maladministration,
incompetence and unjust practices; and stunt our open society at every level
from the national and international to the most local. 

Therefore I respectfully appeal to you,
sir, to consider sending the bill back to cabinet before signing it into law.
We know that, if signed as it stands, it will be challenged in the
Constitutional Court. Surely South Africa needs the time and energy this will
consume, to be directed to the far more urgent needs of social cohesion and
rebuilding the ruins left by apartheid. These are so evident in most of our
townships, for example in their health, education and housing infrastructure,
let alone across rural South Africa. 

As a fellow South African and Christian,
I ask you not to sign this bill. Listen again to the cries of your people. 

Yours in the service of Christ

+Thabo Cape Town

Issued by the Office of the Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town. Inquiries:
Ms Wendy Tokata on 021-763-1320 (office hours) 		 	   		  
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