BETTER FEWER LAWS, BUT BETTER

Mr Hakainde Hichilema’s Journalism Bill will kill journalism and media freedom and must be vigorously opposed and stopped. It must be killed before it kills journalism and media freedom in this country.

And moreover, Mr Hichilema is taking us back to where we were  thirty years ago. Mr Frederick Chiluba tried to do the same in 1995. The High Court of Zambia stopped him; blew him offside. His bill was found to be unconstitutional. What has changed?

Dickson Jere has aptly summed up that 1995 experience:
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Strict statutory regulation of the practice of journalism won’t deal with the deficiencies of the media and practice of journalism in this country. It will, however, put the entire practice of journalism under house arrest. It is a contradiction to try to support both a free media and tighter statutory regulation of the practice of journalism in whatever form.

Journalism is an open calling, not a closed profession. It is dangerous to try and turn journalism into a closed profession like medicine or law and start to license journalists. This will strike a serious blow against media freedom.

Journalism is no more than the paid – and increasingly the unpaid  – exercise of the general right to freedom of expression.  That is why it should be open to anybody who feels called to it or simply has something to say. Journalism should not be treated as a closed profession requiring special entry standards and regulations. Journalists are not doctors or lawyers (as a glance at the pay slips of most struggling hacks would readily confirm). A system allowing them to be struck off or denied a press card for breaching some enforced code would be anathema to media freedom. Professional journalism, in terms of standards and seriousness, always, but journalism as a closed profession, never.

Zambia doesn’t need these laws that Mr Hichilema is ceaselessly enacting to curb freedom of expression, speech, and the media.

We already have more laws regulating the newsmedia in Zambia than we need. We don’t need additional ones. We don’t need this journalism bill of Mr Hichilema.

Better fewer laws, but better. The notion that there are not enough legally enforceable  restraints on the practice of journalism in Zambia is a bizarre distortion of the truth. The Zambian media is hemmed in and harassed on all sides by dozens of laws, and the list is growing. What we need is the government’s nose out of the media. The media has to be subject to the same system of criminal justice as everybody else. But no more than that.

There should be no laws that single out the media for special treatment or criminalise free speech and the normal business of investigative journalism. Any and all burdensome legal impediments to practice of journalism should be opposed in the spirit of the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which declares that government “shall pass no law abridging the freedom of speech,  or of the press”.

Everybody with a liberal bone in their body will not fail to recognise that the laws Mr Hichilema is enacting or trying to enact are the worst we have ever seen in this country and are repugnant to the principle of free speech and media, and that is putting it politely.

It’s impossible to build meaningful democracy without tolerance and genuine judgementalism. True tolerance means allowing others the freedom to say and publish things that you don’t want to hear. Genuine judgementalism means having the liberty to tell them exactly what you think of it. The first response to any controversy should be: You Can Say That. Just so long as you take responsibility for your words, and we can then say you are talking bunk or even tell you that you shouldn’t have said it, just because you can. Our best weapon in striving for the truth is scepticism and argument, not sanctimony and intolerance.

Dr. Fred M’membe
President of the Socialist Party and International Press Institute World Press Freedom Hero