SOUTH AFRICAN BROADCASTING CORPORATION 2016 - SOUTH AFRICAN APARTHEID GOVERNMENT 1988

De ja vu comes to mind with the oppressive regime running not only South Africa in government but in its organisations such as the SABC - the South African Broadcasting Corporation.

It reminds one again and again of how the apartheid government treated the SABC and the public by controlling rigidly what we could listen to, and after 1975 when we were allowed - finally to watch television - what we could watch. 

The control of the system was in line with what was at that stage a police state.

What is different in 2016? What are Zuma and the SABC doing to journalism in South Africa? Why don't we just say that the police state is back only controlled by the ANC and not the National Party?

Read the following article and weep:

Register of Journalists

Article in the Australian Financial Review

22 July 1988

All journalists in South Africa are to be forced to register with the Government under recently promulgated special regulations.

Those who fail to register could be jailed for up to 10 years.

Journalists claim the Government intends to withdraw registration, and hence the right to work, from over-critical journalists.

A spokesman for the Liberal Progressive Federal Party, Mr Peter Soal, said the regulations were “horrendous……….a pernicious form of intimidation” stemming from the Government’s “insatiable desire to control the flow of news.”

A parliamentarian who resigned from the ruling National Party last year, Mr Wynand Malan, called them “a step backwards for basic human rights”.

The editor of South Africa’s largest daily newspaper, The Star, Mr Harvey Tyson, said the regulations violated “the very basis of freedom of information and independent journalism.”

The Government already has a powerful arsenal of press curbs. Reporting of the military, prisons, oil procurement and political violence is restricted.

Under the current state of emergency, “subversive” reporting is punishable by up to 10 years in prison, and the Government can close newspapers for three months at a time. It temporarily closed two newspapers this year.

AAP