Next time some religious maniac tries to muzzle the Internet because he wants to protect your kids from the evils of pornography, think again
WE were somewhat fortunate to be travelling the Maputo corridor a week before armed maniacs pulled off the third biggest robbery in this country's history.
So instead of the slings and AK-47s of outrageous fortune, the worst we were subjected to was the incipient stench and pollution of the Mpumalanga collieries which cover Witbank in a wet, flatulent shroud.
But we were on our way to Swaziland, not Maputo. His Majesty, Mswati III, does not require visas, but has decreed that we are not allowed to bring in fresh produce or pornography.
Maybe his reed dance would lose some attraction were topless pictures to be freely available at Mbabane?
Or Swazi fathers might cotton on to the fact that Playboy pays significantly more than the stipend accorded to a third wife?
Mbabane is a construction site. The place is growing at a phenomenal rate. And the Taiwanese — recently spurned by South Africa in favour of mainland China — are pouring resources into the kingdom.
And right in the middle of Mbabane is an Internet café where a group of students were huddled around a computer screen.
Who gives a damn about Mswati's border controls when Miss Silicone '97 is a mere mouse-click away?
It ties in with the muzzling order handed down against Independent Newspapers last week, restraining us from publishing the name of the country[fn]Independent Newspapers has since defied the interdict and published the name of the country, Saudi Arabia[/fn] with whom Denel is about to conduct a multi-billion rand arms deal.
The law is an ass.
Independent in South Africa may be restrained from publishing the name of the country, but no such restraint can be applied to the group's publications around the world.
And while physical copies of the London or Irish Independent — or The Guardian, which published the name of the country — may be intercepted at our borders, our courts have no way of preventing any of us from hopping into Cyberspace.
So we now have this perfectly ridiculous situation where we are not able to mention the name of this country — which is hardly a model of democracy, human rights, or gender equality — but we are able to tell you that you can stroll down to your local Internet café, and hop across to the London papers and find out for yourself.
The supreme irony is that in this country — which has one of the most progressive and enlightened constitutions ever written and which promises to address the inequities of the past — access to information is suddenly once again the preserve of the affluent few.
God forbid that the great unwashed — who rely on the humble newspaper to keep them informed as to what is going on in their world — should actually know the names of the (expletive deleted) to whom we will be supplying weapons, let alone the fact that they have no concept of democracy or women's rights.
This is not the ANC's fault. The 1968 law which Denel invoked is still on our statute books.
The Open Democracy Bill, approved by cabinet in June, will repeal the 1968 law. It will give any person the right to information held by government, regulates the use of information held about citizens by government or private agencies, and protects whistleblowers.
I have high praise for Thabo Mbeki's team who put the Open Democracy Bill together. It's about bloody time.
But I'm also glad that the Internet sits hovering in the background as a gentle deterrent to warmongering bureaucrats of the apartheid era.