We Suffer From Terrorism Paranoia

FOR years Namibia’s intelligence services were abused for political ends but in 1990 the new political leaders promised that never again would those in power be placed in a position to misuse the state apparatus not only to spy on their political opponents, but also to harass people.

We seem to have reneged on that promise.Nowadays I get the impression that we have paranoia about terrorism and see a possible suspect behind every other bush.I based my introduction on various recent personal experiences as well as those of friends who keep complaining about how their private calls and short messages from cellphones are intercepted.And this will probably intensify as we come nearer to next year’s Swapo congress. Whenever a Swapo congress comes up, the intelligence machinery goes into top gear with various personnel spying on others for either those in charge of campaigns or for candidates themselves.Apart from circumscribing freedom of information (which will have an inevitably negative impact on our freedom to communicate), another implication of such behaviour by officials from a certain agency is that it causes fear among people.Just a few weeks ago there was a big workshop which brought together government officials, academics, practitioners, members of civil society, experts from international organisations and representatives from a number of countries to discuss the practical implementation of the UN global counter-terrorism strategy.Various papers were presented at the workshop including one on money-laundering.Despite the paper having being presented at the workshop, The Namibian has struggled for the past few weeks to get a copy of it.Before being made available to The Namibian, it had to be ‘cleared’ by the Namibia Central Intelligence Agency and they refused to make it available to the newspaper.This is the same agency whose operatives keep harassing the media for documents and other information on a continuous basis.In the meantime, reports this week indicated that a group of Members of Parliament from the committee on defence and security were taken through a session to ‘sensitise them on security issues’.Some of them were very impressed with what they were taught.This is exactly the outcome the spies wanted because they did the training to win them over for when the spies do things in the name of national security.The decision by intelligence to block the release of a paper which was presented at a public gathering shows the extent of the paranoia we have about terrorism.Almost every document is seen as confidential and treated as such.But we should be asking: Is the confidentiality we attach to some of these things absolutely necessary?Why should we, for instance, deny the existence of a document which is freely accessible in a public office such as a Government ministry.Such action only justifies the concerns raised by different media houses and media rights campaigners about the lack of access to information in Namibia.While those who block the media access to information use the lack of such legislation to their advantage, they are the same people who violate laws such as the amended Communications Act which calls on them to get a court order if they want to, for instance, intercept information.Such things smack of hypocrisy and cannot be left unchallenged.I know that Namibia was not the first country with a Communications Act which facilitated the interception of information and that those who are for it argue that it has mainly to do with ‘international terrorism’ and cyber crime.However, we seem to exaggerate our actions against terrorism to the extent that we have now reached levels of paranoia that do not seem warranted right now.