Zambians are looking on with bemused
irritation as President Michael Sata and his Patriotic Party government
continue to shred to pieces the country’s democratic freedoms, with free speech coming under serious attack.
On
Tuesday Sata’s government that is becoming unnecessarily insecure of divergent
views, blocked country’s popular online publication the Zambian Watchdog.
The WATCHDOG, which has taken the true
meaning of adversary to President Sata's rule by decree administration, has
been blocked on all but one ISP portals available in the country.
The publication was pulled down from the
dot.com delivery channels around 15.00 hours as the PF continues to pursue the
publication for alleged disrespecting of government leadership.
This is the second time this month that
government has resorted to desperate measures to block public access to the
WATCHDOG, which has lived true to its name in the recent past—bringing to the
desktops, laptops and palmtops of Zambians information government would rejoice
seeing buried at the dump-pits or kept under government secret seal.
The online publication has been stoic even
to a point of calling President Sata, an ailing dictator—a deliberate choice of
the words to provoke the Zambian leader who has chosen to become a recluse,
hardly seen and heard in public on many issues affecting the nation and showing
high levels of intolerance to the opposition.
It is for the first time since Zambia
returned to multiparty politics 22 years ago that a publication has faced
incessant government attack to the point of complete closure and random
detention of all journalists suspected to be associated with it.
In the past government administrations
under UNIP and MMD blocked publication of specific newspaper editions that they
perceived uncouth to the tastes of the governors, but the PF government seems
to be taking a hardliner stance not just to stop a particular story in a
publication, but seek complete closure of publications like the WATCHDOG.
Many people in the country who believe in
the respect of the freedom of the press have booed the government’s extremist
stance, believing the government is doing all this to hide several things it continues
to do wrong but wants to keep away from public knowledge.
As the government grows paranoid and sensitive
to criticism, independent and wide-reaching publications like the WATCHDOG will
be obvious targets.
When the Zambia Watchdog was first tampered
with by government on all, but one ISP, including mobile phone service
providers, a prominent reggae Musician Maiko Zulu announced publicly that he
was abandoning Airtel mobile phone to MTN so that he could continue enjoying
the Watchdog. Airtel immediately restored the online publication which had
quickly eluded the government filtering gadgets on http://www.com
to https://zambianw.com
Now, using its censorship spooks from
Zambia Information Technology and Communication Authority (ZICTA), it looks
like government is quickly devising new munitions to completely put down the
WATCHDOG.
This move does not settle well with the
Zambian electorates who are rightly suspicious that President Sata wants to run
a highly secretive regime, even to a point of shamelessly taking the nation
back to a point where the civil service jobs are infiltrated by intelligence
security personnel.
Without the Watchdog, Zambians will be left
to consume pro-government announcements in the now compromised tabloid The Post
Newspaper and government owned broadsheets, Zambia Daily Mail and Times of
Zambia that hardly give people any freedom of talking back even on their online
versions. People will also be like zombies—never to say anything of
dissatisfaction against the President or his government, as desperation leads
PF to recruit special operatives to stop what information minister Kennedy
Sakeni calls sensitive state documents from government offices.
President Sata has already killed the
freedom of expression and association in the country, using the colonial law of
Public Order Act so that police deny all political parties permits to hold
public meetings.
Private radio stations have also been put
under a magnifying glass and are not safe place for free flow of opinion on public
matters. Opposition political leaders are endangered species and those who dare
visit these radio stations to make statements do so at their own peril.
Intolerance from PF terrorists abounds.
Recently Alliance for Better Zambia (ABZ) leader Frank Bwalya, a Catholic
priest who helped Sata and the Patriotic Front in his campaigns to make
Zambians disdain and vote out the Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD) had
his day of being embarrassed by PF terrorists. This is when he was attacked and
drenched in pours of Chibuku, an opaque beer of grain by youths from the PF
right inside the Ichiengelo radio station that he used to run and utilised to
campaign for Sata.
A University of Zambia radio station was
threatened of closure by the ministry of information and broadcasting for
airing programmes and reaching out to the audience allegedly not permitted by
the broadcast license issued to the institution.
People who have publicly denounced the
President for awkward decisions that are laughable have found themselves
bundled to police and charged. One senior economist at Ministry of Finance is still
facing uncertain fate for questioning the intelligence of Sata over his
unbudgeted for projects in public.
Not long ago, PF political hoodlums
wielding all sorts of missiles attacked members of the civil society, clergy
and ordinary citizens who had gathered in Church to reflect on government
withdraw of fuel and maize subsidies. The attack also set a tone of the brutal
and senseless intolerance that those with any view different from government
will be subjected to.
Up-to-date there has been no mention of the
issue or an apology from Sata, a sad sign of silence ordinary citizens view as
clear endorsement of violence by the President himself.
With Sata and the PF leadership stopping at
nothing to silence media that covers news government does not want to hear and
gagging all other available means for citizens to voice dissent, the nationals
in the country are left to follow their leaders blindly without asking why.
It is bad for democracy and this will not
give the Patriotic Front a honeymoon to 2016 when the country returns to the
polls to test the popularity of Sata and his PF gang that became the second
political party to form government in 22 years of multiparty democracy.
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