Wits Journalism and the South African National Editors’ Forum (SANEF), sponsored by the British and Canadian High Commissions in Pretoria, hosted a conference on the Rights, Regulation and Responsibilities of Africa’s Media, a conference which resulted in the signing of the Wits Declaration by delegates of the conference. We took the opportunity to speak to Mondli Makhanya, Chairperson of SANEF, who offers his views on a range of things related to the media, including a press council, self regulation and regulation.

What exactly does your organization do, in a nutshell?

Well, we are a forum of editors and news decision makers in media organizations, both print and broadcast and we also have media academics, journalism professors and so on. What we do is first of all defend media freedom rights, run public campaigns, lobby governments and businesses.

You lobby for the freedom of expression?

Yes, for freedom of expression and if there are laws coming up in parliament, we find out about their implications and make a case in parliament.

Speaking of laws, what is your reaction to the law which is coming up: the Protection of Information Bill?

(laughs) Which is also known colloquially as the “secrecy bill”. What this bill essentially does is that it entrenches secrecy. The right of a government to keep things secret more than it should under excessively broad definitions of national security and national interest. It empowers officials at state institutions whether in government, parastal companies or local councils to basically become keepers of secrets. They can determine what they want to be kept secret.

What is the rationale behind this bill?

The rationale behind it is just to enable government to keep a lot of information away from the public. There are a lot of stories that the media has unearthed in the last ten years or so that if this bill had been in place would have never seen the light of day since it would have been deemed not in the national interest or detrimental to national security. So we mobilized very strongly and collaborated with civil society and NGOs and the government found itself on the back foot and now the bill is stuck.

It’s stuck? Does that mean it’s not going to go through?

Well it’s stuck because the campaigns against it made the process of passing it so much longer. The bill was being run by an ad-hoc committee of parliamentarians and the process took so long that the committee had to be dissolved, go back to parliament and reconstitute another committee. Now, we are going into election time as well, so it might be later in the year that it will be back. We, however, made suggestions to the government and got a lawyer and have been very active. In the end, we handed them a big document containing our analysis and suggestions.

Currently what you have is self-regulation through the press Ombudsman and press council. How is that working?

It is working and it can be strengthened. The idea is to find ways and means to strengthen it.

In your intervention at the conference, you said that we journalists sometimes shoot ourselves in the foot. How do we do that?

Sometimes we do stupid things. If only we did our journalism properly. We actually arm our enemies by writing without checking our facts at times. We strengthen their argument.

And what is their argument?

They say that the press council is ineffective they say that it has no teeth.

Interviewed by : Touria Prayag

Read the full interview on the e-paper.