By Umaru Fofana
In the last week, or so, incendiary statements against media freedom and free speech in Sierra Leone have been made, and more are still being made by Dr Sylvia Blyden, the Special Executive Assistant (SEA) to President Ernest Bai Koroma.
If she had made them when she was a newspaper publisher a few months ago, I would have ignored her like I did on many occasions. But in view of her present role, and having emphasised that she was speaking on behalf of her government, the assumption is that she is doing so now with the acquiescence of her boss. Unless he comes out and distances himself from her utterances.
I do not think this is about power being corrupt and absolute power being absolutely corrupt. Or unlimited power being apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it. No! This goes beyond that in my view. And true to her, she is not issuing all the threats alone.
Now, over the weekend, and not for the first time, I got a few calls and some Facebook messages from friends and other well-wishers both within and outside Sierra Leone alleging that my name had been listed among a group of journalists to be sent to gaol under the obnoxious Criminal and Seditious Libel Law provisions.
Obviously it is pretty serious stuff when you consider why Part 5 of Public Order Act was promulgated in the first place, and how it is so open to abuse by those in authority. That notwithstanding I dismissed the allegations as I had so often done even to death threats that had been made against me in the past. Then came yesterday Monday 17 June, the statement was confirmed by the SEA to the president of Sierra Leone. Sylvia Blyden published the thinly-veiled threat in her Awareness Times newspaper.
Even though I have this nagging feeling in me, perhaps a premonition, that I will not die a natural death – I will be shot and later die in a hospital – I do not believe that time is now. When that eventually happens the repercussions will be so grave for those responsible that Sierra Leone will forever change for the better.
When I chose journalism as a career, fresh from university in 1996, at a time of a raging brutal rebel war in the country, I was not oblivious of the challenges that lay ahead. I did not have to wait for too long to experience at first hand the brutality that accompanied the job I had signed up to.
In search of the news, six armed rebel soldiers chased me in October 1997. They arrested me. Shot me in the leg. Tortured me: Burned polythene plastic bags and dropped the flames on my back. Urinated in my mouth. Sealed my lips. Forced me to swallow the liquid from an alcoholic who had probably not bathed for days.
This was at a time when many of those who today feel Sierra Leone belongs to them were living in the comfort of another country. This was at a time when those who are beneficiaries today of our sacrifice as journalists occupied the back stage and looked on.
I later left the hospital and, on crutches, returned to the newsroom to continue doing what I had signed up to do and what I believed was what my country needed – dispassionate truth-telling and speaking truth to power. Then, like now, I refused to pay attention to threats and blackmail.
That was under a military dictatorship. If that did not force me to leave journalism, especially after the late Col AK Sesay had pleaded to my sense of regionalism if only so I would support his AFRC junta, the threats by a public official of an elected government cannot stop me from watching a football match even when Manchester United are trailing badly.
But I will ignore that specific threat against me by Sylvia Blyden and concentrate of her attack against the Sierra Leone media in general. First off, whoever thinks they can tame the media almost certainly needs taming. The world's worst dictators tried it. It did not last. In this age when different channels of communication and information dissemination keep emerging it will be foolhardy for anyone to think they can successfully clamp down on us without they being crushed first. The media will always triumph. And President Koroma need not look beyond 2007 to appreciate this. A government that issues diatribes against journalists, chest-beating to “deal with” them, is on a self-appeasement and self-destruction overdrive. Government functionaries will come and ago. The media will remain. We are too divergent to be controlled by anyone's agenda or intimidated.
The statement by Dr Blyden for the Sierra Leone media to “prepare for a massive and long overdue sanitisation” would have been ignored as one of those many things she enjoyably wrote about many decent people in society in her previous capacity as a newspaper publisher. After all that is what some of us laid our lives down for – to defend unfettered free speech.
Defend their right as journalists – that was what I did, as president of the journalism fraternity, when police asked the public to arrest the then editor of the Awareness Times newspaper, Abdul Fonti Kabia and the newspaper's publisher, the same Sylvia Blyden, because their paper had published something about the President's private life bordering on a public institution. That was what I did when I challenged the police for what I saw and still do see as the irresponsibility of the leadership of the SLP and accused them of inciting irate youth against the media practitioners.
That was what I did when I challenged the Attorney General and Minister of Justice when, in a complaint letter to the Independent Media Commission against the same Dr Blyden, Frank Kargbo threatened to invoke the provisions of the obnoxious Criminal and Seditious Libel Law against the then publisher. No regrets even today, I have to add.
Now that she is Special Executive Assistant to the president such a statement from Blyden cannot be ignored. In his message marking World Press Freedom Day this year, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon said that “When it is safe to speak, the whole world benefits”. I make bold to add therefore that when it is not safe to speak the who world suffers. The utterance by Sylvia is a thinly-veiled threat against press freedom in Sierra Leone and negates what Mr Ban spoke about on 3 May.
Dy Blyden has also been quoted as having pooh-poohed the independent Media Commission when she reportedly said that “It is now apparent that the Independent Media Commission has no intention of using the powers granted them to maintain sanity in the media and so we, as a government, are going to be left with no option but to save the country from sliding backwards at the hands of reckless media practitioners. The only solution is to apply Part 5 of the Public Order Act of 1965 and start charging errant persons to court for criminal and seditious libel”.
I find it very strange that she can say this if it is not representative of the views and intentions of President Koroma. Even a child born last year does not need telling that the above statement by Sylvia was made in her official capacity, as someone who supposedly has the eyes and ears of the president. This is a thinly-veiled threat against Sierra Leonean journalists by President Koroma. Let the president prove me wrong by distancing himself from the statement.
Coming from someone who works at the presidency of a country which is a member of the UN, Article 19 of whose Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees “seeking and receiving information of any kind and the dissemination of information and opinions through any means” this deserves an unequivocal condemnation by State House. The right enshrined in the UDHR is “a right that is correctly regarded as being central to the proper functioning of a civil and a democratic society...” according to the Irish President, Michael Higgins.
Addressing hundreds of journalists from around the world in Dublin early this month, President Higgins said "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference, and impart information and ideas through any media regardless of frontiers". Such threats against the media simply because they do not agree with someone else's views is condemnable.
“Today, in many parts of the world journalists have their lives and livelihoods threatened on a regular basis” President Higgins said, adding “...we are also aware of a worrying increase in acts of verbal, legal and physical aggression against journalists around the world.”
Ireland's continued support to Sierra Leone should continue to be defined by our government's behaviour towards the media – in action and in words. “When attacks on the media take place they are not solely attacks on individual journalists as they attempt to inform the public without fear for their personal safety or their economic well being. They are also attacks on the very foundations of human rights, undermining the public good and the creation of democratic societies underpinned by a freely operating press allowed to work under the principles which lead to diversity and pluralism.” Higgins went on.
The principle of diversity and pluralism which lies at the heart of the media must be protected if we are to promote a free flow of ideas and information and strengthen the exercise of freedom of expression around the world.
If anyone thinks the media have wronged them, a threat of intimidation cannot cow us. Follow the law. Who does not know who the reckless ones in the Sierra Leone media are? But the decent ones have never called for them to be hanged.
Pluralism, genuine diversity and choice especially in the media are critical and should not “be reduced to a false choice between partisan media arrayed on ideological grounds...” I will return to this and the the Chapultepec, Table Mountain, Windhoek Declarations among others, and the enshrined freedoms of the media in any society that thinks itself to be a democracy. Plus how making the media responsible cannot be used as justification to threaten and intimidate journalists. We are here to stay. Even if the night turns to day.
