A Cautionary Tale From The Crypt

ONE of the weapons effectively used against Kenyan corruption buster John Githongo and which eventually drove him to isolated paranoia and into exile, was constant electronic surveillance by the Kenyan security services.

Githongo’s downfall was his single-minded pursuit from 2002, from within Mwai Kibaki’s office, of the astronomical Anglo Leasing scam, in which hundreds of millions of dollars were corruptly appropriated under the guise of ‘national security’ and funnelled into shady offshore shell companies. The scam implicated Kibaki and a host of senior cabinet ministers, who used the Kenyan state’s impressive electronic surveillance capabilities to neuter and hound a moral man, who only wanted to serve and better his country, out of office. The Anglo Leasing affair, as well as Githongo’s revelations of high-level corruption, was one of the direct detonators of the December 2007 ‘stolen’ elections, post-election violence in which more than a thousand were killed and hundreds of thousands still remain internally displaced, and the fracturing of Kenya into a tense tribally divided state.This cautionary tale has echoes in the current discussion around the ‘spy clause’ in the Communications Bill, and once again highlights the ambiguity of ‘national security’.In Namibia, if we’re honest, the line between party and government has long since blurred and Swapo has explicitly voiced its intention to staff key civil service sectors with ‘loyal party cadres’, thus tightening its grip and ownership of the state.In Namibia, if we’re honest, the ruling party is fractured, with roiling internal strife intermittently spilling into the public sphere. In Namibia, high-level corruption is being blissfully ignored, as evidenced by the unforthcoming findings of various presidential enquiries. This is also a country where information that should be public is kept secret and centralised. Against this background, is there still someone who’ll try and convince me that the ‘spy clause’ and its clumsy insertion into the Communications Bill is not party politically motivated?Consider that the ruling party has already displayed a very marked aversion to boisterous internal debate and disagreement, and is prone to sycophancy – it doesn’t take much to draw a rational conclusion. And we’re supposed to blithely disassociate the ruling party’s Zanu-PF-esque tendencies, despite the Mugabe regime being such a close ally, from this piece of contentious legislation. And since when is the infantile everybody-else-is-doing-it a sensible argument for doing anything, much less spending millions of taxpayer dollars?In a country already in the grips of a culture of fear, I’d hazard it would take only the perception, with a few calculated early demonstrations, of being spied on for complete silence to reign. The very nature of legislation like this is to monitor, control and manipulate who says what to whom, a la former East Germany.The point here is that the proposed legislation is inward looking and not focused on perceived external cyber threats.We, the people, can very easily and quickly, at the whim of the unscrupulous, become the victims of such a regime, as the Githongo story illustrates. That is not to say that electronic surveillance, of politicians and others, is not already happening – it probably is – but this upgrade would push the state’s intrusion into private space to a whole other level. Doomsday scenarios aside, the question of course is whether we trust our leaders, and by extension those manning the spy technology, to act responsibly? And maybe everything is as above board as put forward and we in the media are really just ‘sensationalising’ the whole ‘spy clause’ issue. Given the timing and political environment, somehow I think not.