It may sound a little cruel, but I would really like to see the Sierra Leone Association of Journalists (SLAJ) fighting for its very survival. That’s the time you get the best out of the greats and the upstarts.
Many years ago some journalists decided that SLAJ was behaving like any government agency and being unable to constitutionally remove the administration and change course they opted to form a new body called The Association of Independent Journalists of Sierra Leone. The parent body was rocked. Some big hitters started developing interest in the new idea. But in the end, it just didn’t work. Quite recently we have heard about another body – the Press Union of Sierra Leone. It was reported in the Awareness Times that already the new kid is doing well raising good money with pledges of more cash and moral support. Once again SLAJ is being called upon to fight for dear life and this could well be the last battle.
The bone of contention this time is not whether the association is democratic or radical enough, it is about this vexed question of keeping seditious libel and defamatory laws in the Public Order Act of 1965 and a few other laws dealing with the same issues in which journalists have described as draconian because they criminalise free speech. I say bone of contention because cracks have appeared once again in the ranks of SLAJ. Dr. Sylvia Blyden owner of the Awareness Times has jumped to the flip side of this emotive debate arguing that the laws must stay in place unless some insurance scheme was set up to compensate people whose personality could be assailed by journalists. We note that this is the same position that the government has been canvassing with the Independent Media Commission.
The President of Sierra Leone, Ahmad Tejan Kabbah actually caused a letter to be written to the Commission asking it to start a debate around the issue as a first step towards any review of those sections of the Public Order Act. This came after several years of sustained pressure on the SLPP government for the laws to be expunged by SLAJ.
It’s always good not to disregard the efforts of other people who develop new ideas and form new associations, but I’m confident SLAJ is here to stay.
First of all I applaud the decision of the Association to re-elect Ibrahim Ben Kargbo the editor of The New Citizen for another two years. IB has done a terrific job since becoming president and I look forward to more hard work in the coming crucial days in the life of Sierra Leone.
Let me however draw his attention to the fact that the central plank of SLAJ’s project to professionalize the media - making it more relevant to Sierra Leone remains the total removal of sections of the Public Order Act of 1965 dealing with defamatory and seditious libel and all other laws that annihilate free speech in Sierra Leone.
We have argued from our pedestrian understanding of the law and the constitution that there exists a clear conflict between our rights and obligations under the constitution and the draconian prescriptions of those sections of the Public Order Act that completely shackle the media
This must remain the position of the Association and it must be vigorously pursued now more than ever before. SLAJ must consider all other comments to the contrary; especially from within as mere distraction and when all is said and done, we live in a democracy where people should speak freely. That’s in fact what we are protecting.
Our colleagues at Awareness Times broke ranks with us not too long ago to advocate for the retention of those laws that criminalise free speech in the absence of some insurance premium against libel. I urge them to think again. Our predecessors around the world successfully fought this battle a long time ago. The facts are there.
There are many reasons why we have not succeeded in doing away with this bad piece of legislation. I will identify only two for now in the hope that the real debate around this issue will begin and that the intemperate language now characterising the discourse on both sides will give way to a constructive national dialogue devoid of unnecessary emotional outbursts heavily laden with the flawed idea that some people are more patriotic than others.
It’s simply a disgrace to continue to keep a law like this in place and engage in scare-mongering about Sierra Leone going up in flames as soon as criminal and seditious libel laws are removed from our books.
I have heard people draw parallels with Radio Mille Collin in Rwanda and the fact that it was “responsible for the genocide of 1994” in that country, insinuating therefore that media people here could be just as dangerous. Now, this is not an attempt to downplay the role this radio played once the plane carrying Juvenal Habiyarimana and his Burundian counterpart had been shot down over Kigali airport, but when people deliberately speak out of context and misinform others in this way and feel good about it in 21st century Sierra Leone, we have a big problem. There are several books about the Rwandan genocide –how it was planned and executed and for what purpose. I am sure the people making those comments know that there are far bigger issues at stake in the Rwanda debacle than the high priests of our national conscience and moral absolutists are honest enough to include in this discussion.
The first problem with the SLAJ campaign is that there are structural weaknesses in the way its secretariat is coordinating it. Yes, we are finally going to court and we are blessed with one of the best lawyers in this country. However all of us know that journalists are not the most popular people in Sierra Leone or all over the world. SLAJ has failed to form a broad coalition with local civil society organisations and international media watchdogs to make its case much more forcefully before the people of Sierra Leone and the international community.
The next one is the position advanced by the Independent Media Commission IMC in its annual report (2005). The Commission notes that ‘… from the nationwide consultations, three scenarios have so far emerged. There are those who believe that the defamation and seditious libel laws should be totally expunged from the 1965 Public Order Act and should not be replaced by anything. Others feel that provisions for custodial sentences should be repealed and replaced by huge fines, while others believe that given the frequency with which the public is being unjustly libelled by the press through irresponsible reporting the law must remain. Those who prefer the latter appear to be in the majority.
It is expected that a consensus that will represent the national position on the issue will emerge at the wrap-up national position seminar in 2006 to enable the IMC transmit the national view on the issue to State Lodge and the general public’
I brought this out to put the IMC’s position on this issue in proper context. As far as I know, the process is incomplete. There is no national consensus on the issue. How can anybody now use the incomplete IMC exercise as the gospel of Mark?
With respect to the Commission, I think the method by which they collected their data was very unscientific. The idea that holding focus group meetings in the regions and engaging the public in Freetown in a debate on a phone-in program on radio are the best barometers to judge public opinion on an issue as fundamental as this is flawed.
I was part of the initial planning process but had to pull out of the radio programs because I felt that in an atmosphere so prejudiced against journalists, those who could afford phones to call the radio programs were definitely not people who believe in the mission of the media. I suspected that there was going to be some cynical political manipulation of the debate. Not by the IMC, I should make this clear. We all know how these things happen in Sierra Leone.
Section 26 and 27 of the Public Order act of 1965 is unambiguous. “Any person who maliciously publishes any defamatory matter knowing same to be false shall be guilty of an offence called libel and liable on conviction to an imprisonment for any term not exceeding three years or to a fine not exceeding one thousand Leones or both”. Section 27 says basically the same thing only excluding the expression, ‘knowing same to be false’.
Section 33 deals with Seditious libel. To me this is the most draconian. “any person who does or attempts to do or makes any preparation to do, or conspires with any person to do any act with a seditious intention; or utters any seditious word; or prints, publishes, sells, offers for sale, distributes or reproduces any seditious publication unless he has no reason to believe that it is seditious, shall be guilty of an offence and liable for a first offence to imprisonment…not exceeding three years or to a fine not exceeding one thousand Leones or to both …” There can be no true democracy in any country that maintains these laws.
The intriguing part of this argument is that almost 96% of the libel and defamatory cases that have come before the courts, have been brought by the government, its allies and agencies. And the first legal battle they fight is always to have the case done by judge alone, totally eliminating the possibility of a jury deciding in favour of the journalist. This was what happened in the most recent trial of For Di People Editor Paul Kamara in a case of seditious libel brought against by President Kabbah. The owners of the printing facility and their worker were all charged. Two were acquitted, the other was found guilty with Kamara. He was fined ten thousand Leones, the equivalent of three US dollars while Kamara was jailed. Tell me which sober businessman will invest in the Sierra Leone media only for him to be arrested and jailed because his workers commit an error?
Just the other day I was looking at my notes from my days on the parliamentary press gallery. My attention was drawn to the day Sheka Tarawalli of the then Torch Light newspaper was arraigned before parliament for a story in which he alleged that government had ‘bribed’ parliament with car loans running to thousands of US dollars. David B. Quee an SLPP MP at the time described the Youngman as a ‘traitor…an NPRC man…ought to be taught a sharp rough lesson for him to realise the enormity of his action…’
I was very disappointed that a bright and progressive MP like Osman Kamara of the opposition PDP at that time urged the Parliament to impose ‘custodial punishment’ on Tarawallie after a long and rambling speech justifying the jailing of the journalist. Sheka was indeed jailed for one month. He has since fled Sierra Leone for the safety of the United Kingdom.
So when you constantly harass, chase and cajole the good guys out of journalism and by that open the way for too many upstarts with all the problems associated with that, how do you then complain about quality? Let’s face it. In a recent comment on the ongoing tit for tat lawsuit between the Awareness Times proprietor and the Executive Editor of the Standard Times, the media watchdog Reporters Sans Frontiers acknowledged that “this regrettable case shows that Sierra Leone lacks effective mechanisms for regulating the media” and urged that the cases be withdrawn “so that there can be a serious debate about reform of the defamation law which President Kabbah promised in 2005.”
I am not going to delude myself by giving the impression that there’s no problem of bad eggs in Sierra Leone journalism. This is something journalists themselves have acknowledged a long time ago.
As this government was forcing through a controversial Media Practitioners Act In May 1997, Journalism Professor Ritchard Mbayo of Bowie State University, Maryland USA wrote this in an article in the West Africa Magazine. ‘…With a few exceptions, a tabloid-trashy mentality which propels many newspapers to fill their pages with primarily trivial material, gossip, rumours and outright fabrications, has become the order of the day in Sierra Leone…some journalists even cite instances themselves where reporters have accepted pay-offs to write favourably about certain public officials or prominent citizens’. It’s not as if people are not doing anything about that. So to see all journalists in Sierra Leone as a group of jackals circling around a herd of four million sick buffalos waiting to prey on them is completely disingenuous and must be rejected.
The Professor also argued in that same article that ‘ironically, even with such severe short-comings, the Sierra Leonean press remains an institution that cannot easily be dismissed and those who occupy the seat of political power seem to know this only too well. Besides, many members of the press and a number of individual newspapers continue to play a useful role in promoting the culture of democracy in the country. What all of this means, is that when it comes to dealing with the press, the government may be facing what might be its most perplexing dilemma-how is one to effect a thorough house-cleaning of the press without hurting good newspapers and the good journalists?’
The trouble with our craft is that it’s done in the public domain. Consider this: how many people are dying in health centres across the country owing to criminal neglect and incompetence on the part of health workers? How many people are languishing in prisons all over Sierra Leone just because they can’t get justice in their own country? This makes no case for bad journalism, but it tells us a lot about the country we want to turn into an instant Utopia where all journalists always got their stories in absolutely precise celestial balance.
In 2004, Peter Preston former editor of The Guardian in the UK made the following statement in an article in the British Journalism Review ‘…save us from a structured existence. For the model itself-the model of a perfectly ordered society with a fourth estate nestling snugly in place-is false and deluding. A free press, to function properly, has to be precisely that: free, messy, fallible, as unfettered and unorganised as humanly possible. Freedom, remember is also the freedom to get things wrong.’
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