Why did commission officials bar journalists?

BY ABDALLAH BAWAZIR

8th January 2013

Editorial Cartoon

 The Constitutional Review Commission (CRC) yesterday started collecting views from the country’s institutions — or what are referred to in politics as the special groups.

This category comprises political parties, academics, companies, trade unions, professionals and nongovernmental organizations — in a word the civil society minus the state and individual persons.

Collection of views from this category comes after the commission led by its Chairman, Justice Joseph Sinde Warioba, accomplished its initial task of gathering opinions from 318,583 individuals in 30 regions countrywide.

But the Commission yesterday committed an about-face that caught journalists by surprise. Its deputy secretary, Casmir Kyuki, without any prior notice, discussion or elaboration asked the journalists who, as has been the norm till now, were attending the first of the special groups meetings which started in Dar es Salaam yesterday.

We are equally surprised at the sudden decision to throw a blanket of secrecy in what these special groups have to tell the commission. What really does the commission aim to achieve by the move, other than making the public more suspicious of the goings on?

Whoever thought of the idea and pushed it into the workings of the CRC ought not to be working for the commission.

We thought that the writing of the constitution is a transparent exercise for every individual person just as it is for every social institution?

As tenets of modern democracy aver, a constitution or what is called the fundamental law, is the basic principle upon which every entity that matters in society must be made to constitute the common good that should be held peremptory by every person or institution.

And so we thought that in its making, it is mandatory that the same —individuals and institutions — should take their due positions accordingly without any sort of discrimination.

Barring journalists from the meetings where special groups are airing their views, leaves us wondering where we are starting from in our march to give character to the democratic dispensation that we at all times say the nation is striving for.

When Justice Warioba was handed the mantle seven months ago, he promised among other things, that the CRC would stick to openness, sincerity, candidness — in a word to transparency.

Yesterday’s incident, by the CRC official however makes us question how the commission intends to keep that commitment in the absence of the media being in attendance. The public’s need to know which greatly depends on the media is the casualty here.

Journalists have all along been reporting most of the CRC meetings when members of the public were giving their views. We do not know what has gone wrong this time round that they are told that they cannot be accommodated in the meetings.

Is there anything special with the special groups that the public should not know? Or is CRC mandated to hold some opinion collection sessions in camera? We believe none of these were the reasons for barring the journalists to do their job yesterday.

Whether this was done by mistake or design, the media brethren and the public need an explanation. We owe it to the public at large.

SOURCE: THE GUARDIAN