HOW encouraging that the Swapo vice president, having secured the nomination from his party as their candidate to succeed President Pohamba, is extending an olive branch to the media.
Hage Geingob was reported in some media as calling for a “new chapter of good relations with the media on government and political matters”. He was quoted saying, “I hope we can all put the past behind (us) and start afresh.” We are interested to see what he does in this regard.
Several times over the past few months during the race for his party’s vice presidency, Geingob refused to speak to this newspaper. He and the other two contenders also ignored our requests for an interview about his plans as possible future president.
Geingob was the prime minister in charge of the Cabinet secretariat in 2000 when the Sam Nujoma government banned advertising in this newspaper in an effort to cripple it and there would have been a feeling of déjà vu had he adopted a negative stance against the media.
We do not expect to be loved. For our role in informing people in order to foster progressive debates as well as exposing wrongdoing is largely unenviable. That tends to make news media “a soft target and a stalking horse,” to quote from a recent article by Jay Naidoo, a former minister in Nelson Mandela’s government. “The endgame [by those targeting the media] is delivering a battering ram of political enforcement against the people,” said Naidoo.
Many people in power and the elite would have wanted the media to be pliable and with no backbone, stance or principled existence. The Namibian has come too far to merely flow with the prevailing trend.
This paper takes a principled stance on issues and good governance, albeit while steering away from siding with or endorsing certain individuals and organisations. When our news team gets a tip for a story it goes about its work professionally and guided by ethical standards practised in open societies, concerned only with what is in the public interest.
It appears that some expect our journalists to go soft or hard depending on the prevailing atmosphere or to ‘balance out’ our reporting although such ‘balance’ or objectivity is often only in their perceptions. For example, some expected that during the Swapo vice presidency campaign we should have written the same number of news stories [i.e. for and against] about the three candidates – Geingob, Jerry Ekandjo and Pendukeni Iivula-Ithana. Some blatantly suggested that we hold on to ‘damaging’ stories until after the Swapo congress or write them before so that their opponents suffer.
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Namibia: Press Freedom Can Be About Life and Death