Last week Labour Minister Fackson Shamenda told the unions not to ‘scream through the media’ if they wanted their concerns addressed. The unions, of course, have been protesting against the government’s unilateral imposition of a wage freeze that contravenes present agreements with the unions, and equally contradicts the Industrial Relations Act and ILO Conventions. Despite all this, the unions have met a stonewall in Mr Shamenda, who strangely interprets his job as being the Employer’s Minister rather than the Labour Minister, and spits in the face of union leaders at any and every opportunity.
Shamenda’s statement needs examining. Firstly, it implies that the union’s criticism of government is a type of ‘screaming’, meaning behaviour that is not acceptable and cannot be tolerated. A second implication is that you can only win concessions from government if you negotiate quietly behind closed doors, but if you make your demands in public then you will get nothing. A third implication is that the media is seen as a threat to the government if it voices the people’s protest against government.
All governments in Zambia so far have practiced censorship, but this present government seems particularly nervous and jumpy about any criticism in the media, presumably because they have so much more to hide than any previous government. Many people imagine that censorship is operated by an editor who is a government lackey, whose job is to put a red pen through anything that might embarrass the government. In complete totalitarian states there is a Department of Censorship to which all media copy has to be submitted and subjected to the official scissors, but here in Zambia we have a system which is more complicated and subtle.
It is not uncommon for an editor to get a phone call from a minister, or even the president, with a lecture on what should not have been published, and how it must be followed up with a second story to counter the first story, and so on. I remember, some ten years ago, when I happened to be sitting in the office of Post Editor Fred M’membe, he got a phone call from the then Vice-President, Nevers Mumba, who was complaining about the content of my column which had appeared in The Post that same day. (That, of course, was back in the days when The Post was still a respectable newspaper.) Fred was not at all phased by the intrusion of such a phone call. It was obviously a common occurrence.
Fred soon passed the phone over to me, and I spoke to Nevers Mumba. I had expected him to come up with something substantive, like my column was illegal or immoral or at least factually incorrect. But all he could say was that it was un-Zambian, insensitive, wrongly timed and so on. I answered him forthrightly, and told him that it was the job of the media to hold government to account, and that I didn’t need his advice on how to write for a newspaper. When Fred took the phone back from me, he tried to sooth Mumba down, and afterwards he was a bit cross with me. Apparently the usual policy was to politely say ‘yes yes yes’ to any ghastly leader who couldn’t stand the voice of the people, and thereafter continue exactly as before.
But under the MMD, as with UNIP, there was also a tough and nasty side to censorship. The MMD, before it came into power, had promised to dismantle Kaunda’s state propaganda apparatus – the Times, Mail and ZNBC. Instead they kept it on, and also retained the system where journalists who stepped out of line, for example by following their professional ethics of reporting both sides of a political story, were unceremoniously fired.
But being in favour of privatization, the MMD government was now stuck with the additional problem of how to censor the private media. Since they couldn’t fire journalists who were not government employees, they developed another strategy – instead of being fired the journalists were prosecuted. For this purpose all sorts of ancient colonial laws, such as libel and ‘false information’ and ‘contempt of court’, strangely still on the statute book, were invoked. In addition there was Kaunda’s notorious and undemocratic Defamation of the President Act, which the supposedly democratic MMD was very keen to preserve.
These bogus prosecutions, usually on completely trumped up charges, were not designed merely to put the offending journalists in jail so they could not write the truth in a newspaper or broadcast it on the radio. It also had other purposes. The main purpose was to put the fear of God, or at least the fear of jail, into all journalists. The fear of jail is worse than the fear of being fired, especially if you have ever had the dubious privilege of seeing the inside of a Zambian jail, or even the police cells. The second purpose of prosecutions was to bleed the newspaper or radio station by the constant expense of huge legal fees charged by notoriously predatory lawyers. By such expenses, the intention was to push the ‘offending’ media organisation into bankruptcy. And the owners of private business invest their money to make a profit, not to lose their money in defense of liberty.
In addition, if such methods still do not intimidate journalists, there are more crude ways of doing it – by beating up journalists who are seen reporting on events which the government does not want reported. This dirty work can be done by party thugs, or otherwise the police, who have increasingly become party thugs. This sort of thuggery has markedly increased during the PF regime.
Another way of bleeding a private media organisation is for the government to tell business houses that they will get no business from government if they are found advertising in the critical private media. The larger part of a newspaper’s income, and the entire part of the income of a private radio or TV station’s income comes from advertising, so such a threat is very real and frightening.
In these various ways, government censorship does not need a Stalin-style Department of Censorship. It can run by developing a climate of fear amongst the media community. But during the present PF regime we have also seen a resurgence of a form of intimidation which harks back to the Kaunda regime. It is this form of intimidation which is encapsulated in Shamenda’s warning to the unions ‘not to scream through the media’, where we see a clear example of the extension of fear and intimidation beyond the media, and into the general population.
Whereas the MMD regime used to intimidate the media so that they internalized the standards of censorship necessary to keep body and soul together, now we find that the general population should also internalize censorship of their own opinions in order to keep body and soul together. This form of intimidation may even go to the extent of using party or police thugs to invade a radio station in order to physically remove, or even beat up, a political activist or opposition politician who dares to utter words critical of the government. In this climate of public fear, a government is even able to declare banned topics. For example, currently we not only have a ban on news about the health of the president, we also have a ban on people talking about his health.
And so it might seem that we are all slipping back to the climate of intimidation which so characterized Kaunda’s frightening one-party state.
Except, of course, that nowadays we can all chatter away on the social media and online newspapers! The PF government is an outdated remnant of the one-party state! The internet is now the new medium for democracy! Oppressive government cannot control it! They are fighting a losing battle! Freedom of expression has broken free! Ha ha!
The post Seriously Kalaki: Censorship and the Climate of Fear appeared first on Zambia Reports.