Durban - The government is becoming more secretive to protect politicians from embarrassment. This is one of the findings in the Right2Know Campaign released in its new Secret State of the Nation report.
The report says there has been an increase in the use of state security policies and the National Keypoints Act with little public oversight. It also found that “secrecy and security-state capacity are being used to shield political actors from embarrassment and scrutiny”.
Right2Know’s Kwa-Zulu Natal spokesman, Phezu Mthethwa, said the “secrecy act has been manipulated for political reasons”. Mthethwa said there should be more whistle-blowers who would report corruption within the government. He said this could only be achieved if there was more protection for whistle-blowers.
The director of the SA History Archive, Catherine Kennedy, said the Public Access to Information Act on paper was “beautiful” and that it was one of the best in the world. However, its implementation had been impeded by a number of factors. Chief among those were the lack of political will to implement the act and a poor history of record keeping. “The state ignores requests or says that the record cannot be found.”
Kennedy said another contributing factor was: “People fear the idea of information being made available. Not releasing information causes more problems than releasing it.”
Professor Keyan Tomaselli, of the Centre for Communication, Media and Society at UKZN, said the lack of access to information would affect not only journalists but also academics.
“South Africa will be dealing with censorship and this will hinder the work of academics as well as journalists,” said Tomaselli. He said the press was not the government’s enemy, but was playing the role of a watchdog. He said the release of information would be healthy for the country as it would create an environment of healthy debate in the public sphere.
Daily News