JUST when it seemed we might have been spared the worst excesses of the Protection of State Information Bill, along comes State Security Minister Siyabonga Cwele and puts the whole mess back on the table again.
In a breathtaking display of disrespect for MPs who have battled to reach agreement on amendments to this controversial piece of legislation, Cwele has asked the National Council of Provinces committee working on the bill to reverse several of the most important changes MPs have made.
Among other things, he has urged the committee to widen the right of police and army members to classify information – prompting the Right2Know campaign to point out that if this had been the case at the time of the Marikana massacre very little of the information which has emerged would have seen the light of day; to scrap blanket protection for whistle-blowers; to reinsert a clause which would give this act precedence over the Promotion of Access to Information Act; to reconsider a recent decision to raise the threshold of proof for criminal conviction under the act; and to reinsert a five-year prison sentence for anyone who who discloses classified information.
In other words, the minister would like the committee to go back on months of work and unpick the careful compromises reached across party political lines after hundreds of hours of public hearings and consultations with experts, in Parliament and around the country.
With luck, the MPs will politely tell Cwele to get lost. But anything is possible in the ANC in the run-up to Mangaung, and securocrats in the ruling party will be anxious to consolidate their power to deal with an increasingly restive population. Control over information is a crucial element in that process.
There is some comfort, though, in the thought that even if Cwele does manage to persuade some MPs to backtrack, the chances of the bill passing the constitutional test in the form which he would like it to take are slim.