Zimpapers Logo

members do not have it if they have only some of it in some spheres.”
There is no denying that incremental reductions of aspects of civil liberties are a danger to society. Sometimes claims that members of a society have secure margins of liberties in their lives ring hollow, especially when nation states are dealing with issues of national security, real or imagined.

Civil liberties are often grossly abused by those seeking pretexts to pursue sinister imperial goals, those keen to seek pretexts for attracting cheap and unaccounted for donations from foreign foundations, by nation states seeking to secure unchallenged state power, and by media following the whims of their profit seeking handlers.
Those who fight for civil liberties know too well that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, and for this reason it has always been quintessentially mandatory that threats to civil liberties are resisted vigorously.

There is no concern grave enough to warrant the eroding of people’s freedoms, whether these are peoples within domestic jurisdictions of sovereign states or global citizens whose freedoms may be curtailed by external occupation or dominance.

No assault on the liberties of people is justifiable, not even the assaults made by well meaning politicians who may earnestly, eagerly and sincerely desire to protect us from the threat of bad people with terrible intentions of stealing our resources or dominating us; or from murderous terrorists, or perhaps protecting us from ourselves, when we walk into apparent danger in blissful ignorance.

When Senator Morgan Komichi recently moved a motion calling on Zimbabwean politicians not to incite violence against their political opponents, he was vehemently supported by Senator Alice Chimbudzi from the other side of the Upper House. She condemned electoral violence and blamed politicians “who cause all the violence we see during elections.”
Whether it is for selfish and sinister motives or for sincere and genuine concerns about our security and our sovereignty, it is politicians who are often the most insidious agents of the destruction of liberty. But not too many people believe politicians are in politics for anything more than ambition for power and opportunity to be wealthy, often illicitly.

In the West, the noble intent to protect people from terrorism has washed away substantial liberties and those who truly value the importance of liberties have been vigorously resisting anti-terror laws that are threatening to take away the very essence of personal liberties.
Regimes of liberties are structured of course, and the keystone is commonly considered to be free speech. It is free speech that is required for people to be able to claim what they have lost, to reclaim destroyed liberties, or to defend such liberties when they are attacked.

Democratic processes require the statement and testing of policy proposals and party platforms, and the questioning of governments.
This of course is in mature democracies where political battles are fought on the basis of policy positions, and not on the basis of polarity and high sounding rhetoric, punctuated by empty sloganeering, emotive singing, and chanting of meaningless catch phrases; as is clearly the case with the majority of speeches delivered at Zimbabwe’s political rallies, not least those addressed by

Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, seen in the West as some kind of a democrat.
The man is quite equipped when it comes to vilifying and slandering his political opponents from Zanu-PF – opponents who themselves are rarely outdone in this trifling trading of insults.

Liberties are about the requirement for due process at law, in which people can defend themselves against accusation, accuse wrongdoers who have harmed them, collect and examine evidence, make a case or refute one.

Even the intellectual community thrives on free speech. It is the foundation for genuine education and research, enquiry, debate, exchange of information, challenges to falsehoods, proposal and examination of opinion.

Often it is politicians that have sought to curtail even the liberty of the intellectual, prescribing upon the intellectual community a contrived sense of academia where opinion is engineered and manufactured to promote the interests of the political elites and those that control the means of production, what Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman call “manufactured consent.”
There is this unwanted free speech that allowed Professor Ian Scoones to scientifically establish that contrary to the peddled propaganda that Zimbabwe’s land reform program has failed to yield any meaningful harvests, and that the beneficiaries are largely “Mugabe’s cronies,” the reality is that the newly resettled farmers have significantly improved their agricultural production over the decade, and that a vast majority of them are not politically linked to either President Robert Mugabe or his Zanu-PF party.

Political elites from the UK were not at all amused with what the Sussex University professor found in his study of Zimbabwe’s land reform program. As such, the findings have not been allowed to carry too much currency, save for a carefully worded coverage carried once by the BBC.
If Professor Ian Scoones had confirmed the propaganda peddled against the Zimbabwe Land Reform program there is little doubt that the academic would have received wider coverage and would have easily secured more funding for further research into this matter. This writer thinks Professor Scoones is unlikely to get anymore funding to pursue his research on this particular topic.

One of the most talked about liberties is free press. The warts of free press are too many to mention. One can look at the gratuitous reporting of Lance Guma at SW Radio, the rascality of Zimbabwe’s numerous “news” websites run by completely untrained and uneducated political miscreants masquerading as journalists, or the ignominious editorial feats of Constantine Chimakure, but the reality still remains that a free press is mandatory in a free society.
A free press undoubtedly always abuses its freedoms in the hunt for profit, or in pursuit of the agenda of its funders and handlers, but even this unsavoury reality does not take away the necessity for unimpeded press freedom, however unpalatable it may be.

One can talk of flourishing literature and theatre, innovation and experiments – all this is part of free speech. Freedom in all its respects is grounded largely on free speech. Multi-party politics is a result of free speech, much as political parties in opposition may wail and cry that they are denied free speech, often using free speech to tell us so.
Without free speech there is hardly any other freedom to talk about. This essay is about free speech, much as it is a product of free speech itself. The flourishing of this column is all about free speech, and those who want the column shut are a danger to a free society.

All this said, it is also very true that there must be some measure of limits to free speech at times. The understanding here must be scrupulous and very careful, otherwise it becomes really hard to regulate free speech without having to destroy the essence of free speech itself.
The commonly employed example to illustrate irresponsible behaviour or gratuitous conduct is the person who shouts “Fire!” in a crowded theatre or stadium. Of course there is no such thing as gratuitous or irresponsible causing of harm, unless of course there is something called responsible causing of harm.

But perhaps we must consider the person who shouts “Fire!” in a crowded theatre or stadium when there actually is a fire coming. The harm caused here might be viewed as a bi-product of the overall intention to achieve a greater good.
What is viewed as the greater good can turn out to justify all manner of unjustifiable restrictions on free speech, as happens with matters of “national security,” or the “national interest,” topics of undoubtable prominence in Zimbabwe and the majority of countries.

In Australia and in the UK there has been the criminalisation of “glorification of terrorism” and for the UK, the criminalisation of “incitement to religious hate,” whatever that means.
When restrictions for free speech become wide reaching and generalised, a lot of other freedoms unfortunately get adversely affected. It is when these restrictions are narrowed and specified, often prior to the speech itself, that limitations to free speech does not adversely touch on other forms of freedoms.
It can be seen from the numerous cases of offensive free speech that the very principle of free speech in itself promiscuously allows bad free speech, ranging from the insane utterances of provocative politicians, the stuff that has on more than one occasion seen the likes of Tongai Matutu thrown out of the House of Assembly, to the purely stupid, like the utterances of ex-MP Timothy

Mubhawu on the “inferiority” of women and the “quarantining” of HIV/AIDS patients, to the malicious and even dangerous utterances as was the call for removing President Mugabe “violently” by Morgan Tsvangirai.
Strange utterances are part of free speech, like the recent suggestion by a Senator that man ought to be “immobilised” and restricted to sex once a month, or the eighties suggestion by the late Makokoba Member of Parliament, Sydney Malunga; that rapists are motivated by hunger, a suggestion that saw the late Arcadia MP Joseph Culverwell thrown out of the House for calling the former a “moron,” and refusing to retract that label.

When bad free speech endangers the lives of other people, clearly there is need for such particular speech to be limited at law.
However, in a typically democratic environment the “remedy for bad free speech is better free speech,” as philosopher Anthony C Grayling puts it. It is more effective to counter bad speech by engaging in tolerant and progressive free speech.
Where necessary bad free speech can be remedied in courts of law, especially in cases of libel and slander, although this can only be after the event. The other problem is that defamation cases are generally expensive and most victims of slander cannot afford the cost of getting remedy through the courts.

In fact winning a libel action against a slanderer does not necessarily take away the damage caused by the mud-slinging or malice. It is a permanent scar that remains with its victim even after the victim has been awarded large sums of money in compensation. But such is the price of free speech. It does not come free, and like any other benefit of value, it carries a huge cost.
When liberal democracies begin to limit free speech we have a situation where the basic concept of liberalism and democracy is in itself rendered useless, or at the very least, is undermined.
This is why Western democracies have been under vigorous scrutiny in the aftermath of anti-terror laws – viewed as largely targeting free expression and privacy.

In the purported pursuit of interests of security and safety, there has been widespread censorship by coercion, eavesdropping, and social profiling of minority groups. Needless to say, that has resulted in the diminishing of freedoms for ordinary people.
All those who choose to read the work of authors and columnists like this writer must be reminded that opinions and beliefs are matters of choice, and as such are open to cartoonists, satirists and all who may disagree, just like they are open to the accolades from those who agree and share the same beliefs.

Readers must be alive to the fact that their own perceptions and beliefs can be written against, just like they can be upheld; that they can be criticised, attacked even: and the readers must like it or lump it, or if they are too immature or insecure, or both, they are more than free to stop reading. That is the beauty of free speech. It blesses one and curses the other, amuses one and infuriates the other, inspires one and distresses the other – all in the same breath.

A girl was criminalised and prosecuted in the UK after being labelled a “lyrical terrorist” for writing poems that were interpreted as celebrating s uicide bombers.
It is not different from any of the tyrannical states that prosecute people on the flimsiest of charges, as what the right wing dictators of Central America used to do when they believed they were fighting the spread of communism, killing their political opponents freely in the name of stopping the spread of communism – of course with the full backing of the United States.

By banning the extremist anti-Islam work of Dutch MP Gert Wilders, those who chose to do so actually amplified his message instead of silencing the man. Better free speech against Wilders’ clearly weird ideas would have had a better effect, this writer would argue.
Both the cases of the little UK girl and that of the Dutch MP are examples of intolerance and the threat that today stands against free speech.
In this world of blogging it is almost laughable for many involved when one emphasises the need to protect free speech.

Bloggers largely have a free world on the net, where a great deal of sense is sunk into massive doses of nonsense, with some of the rubbish so nasty that families have been ruined and marriages have tragically ended over what has been said on the Internet.
Racism, xenophobia, homophobia, misogynistic stuff, and suprematism are the order of the day, and the temptation for many governments is to censor this nonsense or to hunt down the culprits with the intention of punishing them to deter would be emulators. That is how censorship of cyber space comes into play, albeit with limited success.

But is the answer the imposition of restraint on free speech, bad free speech as it may be? Or is it wiser to follow the argument by Grayling that the best way to defeat bad free speech is to fight it with good free speech?
The best way to defeat the lies and slander broadcast daily by the likes of Lance Guma on SW Radio is not exactly to call for the shutting down of the pirate radio station, much as the argument is politically strategic for Zanu-PF.

Rather the best way to deal with the hate speech from SW Radio is to refute the propaganda and slander, to expose the agenda of the slanderers and their handlers, to argue down the malice and polarised views: in general to challenge and defeat conveyors of bad free speech through argument, not law or force. Anyone practising gutter journalism like Guma does is not difficult to expose and humiliate.

In fact Lance Guma does an excellent job in humiliating himself, as recently seen through the massive public backlash against his serialising of private information of persons he accused of committing a crime of “working for the CIO”.
One good reason for protecting free speech is that it keeps bad views out in the open and that way such views can be challenged, debated and perhaps giving the counterarguments a chance to be heard.

If we resolve intolerance against bad free speech then we must remember that the chief purveyors are the media. The question of media responsibility and duties is not a minor one, and this is why the Zimbabwe Media Commission must be switched to the game.
As they say, only free societies have free press. But there is a price to pay. No media commission can ever tame the press to shun slander and malice, or bad free speech. The liberties taken and enjoyed by the press often is in regard to the liberties of others.

This is why the press has to be criticised, especially in this day where media circus has fiercely grown to a billion dollar industry – with desire for scoops replacing desire for the truth.
We now have more sensationalists than journalists in the newsrooms and radio studios.
Much as there is so much bad free speech in such a polarised political environment as that of Zimbabwe, it must always be remembered that free speech is so fundamental that there has to be a real good reason to limit it.

It has to be accepted that wholly unlimited free speech carries costs that can be unbearable for any people. A speech that incites violence, unconstitutional means of assuming power, discrimination, or calling for the international isolation of one’s own country is not always acceptable and raises very serious concerns.
There may be clear justification for imposing restraints on such speech, and this is largely why there has been such restraint under Zimbabwean law, not to say that such law has not been applied in politically motivated ways.

It is important to be careful not to unnecessarily indulge in the reckless thinking that considers legal restraint on bad free speech as a licence to extend these restrictions into areas where such restrictions become unjustifiable, for example the so-called glorification of terrorism; or criticising or mocking political beliefs and ideas.
The MDC-T talks so much of “hate speech” whenever their political ideology and beliefs are criticised or mocked, and they are even louder on this when such criticism is levelled against the party’s leadership, so loud and determined that people like this writer have been threatened with arrest, long term imprisonment and even torture when “Zanu-PF is gone and our party comes to power,” to quote an irascible activist based here in Australia.
It is this very attitude of regarding criticism as hatred that breeds egregious tyrants, and it is ironic that the MDC Information Department laments “hate speech” each time the MDC-T is criticised, yet they in the same breath claim to be victims of ruthless laws against free speech.
Is the attitude of those who allegedly curtail the free speech of MDC activists any different from that of the censorious team that runs the MDC-T Department of Information and Publicity, so intolerant that they label their critics “hate speech” criminals?

We can all expect a regime where writers and ascribes will be jailed for “hating” those in power if ever the MDC-T were to assume power in Zimbabwe, and broadcasters too, judging by the proclaimed sentences already passed on the likes of Reuben Barwe or Judith Makwanya, not least their inclusion on the US, EU sanctions list, of course at the behest of this same MDC-T Department of Information and Publicity.

Caesar Zvayi was deported from Botswana where he was lecturing at a university because Nelson Chamisa, Zinasu and other MDC activists based in Botswana campaigned to have him silenced and punished for writing views that did not go down well with the MDC line. This writer is quite privy to the details of the campaign in question, but that is a matter for another day.

One crime that has been defined as constituting “hate speech” is describing the Tsvangirai-West relationship as a puppet-puppeteer alliance, apt and convincing as the description may be. How else is one expected to describe a political leader whose party is founded, funded and directed from Western capitals?
But of import is the fact that describing a political leader as a puppet does not and cannot constitute hate speech, whether that assertion is meritorious or not.

Certainly trying to use the concept of hate speech in curtailing the free speech of those who see you as a puppet is dangerous to the concept of liberal democracy.
Just like spinners from their rival side, perceived propagandists aligned to Zanu-PF have every right to express their views without being placed on “sanctions lists,” or being threatened with deportations, ICC prosecution, or any of this primitive nonsense we keep reading about.

Free speech can only be best accommodated by tolerance and we can only tolerate that we do not like, otherwise we only become biased and self misleading, tolerating nothing we disagree with, and deluding ourselves as democrats in the process.

Zimbabwe we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!!

• Reason Wafawarova is a political writer and can be contacted on [email protected] or [email protected] or visit www.rwafawarova.com