Just as Steve Biko’s death left apartheid-era justice minister Jimmy Kruger “cold” so too will the death of the Novaya Gazeta — one of Russia’s few remaining independent newspapers — leave that country’s president Valdimir Putin cold.
Reuters reported recently that the newspaper’s media licence had been revoked after Russia’s Supreme Court banned the online version of Novaya Gazeta.
The ban came after a Moscow court banned Novaya Gazeta’s print newspaper and its recently founded sister magazine “No” (“But”). The investigative newspaper had roughly 27-million readers desperate for insight into an increasingly news-controlled environment.
Novaya Gazeta’s crimes, according to the Reuters’ report, were: allegedly repeatedly violating restrictions imposed on “foreign agents”, a designation applied to the paper that has also been applied to numerous other voices and organisations at odds with the Kremlin.
Despite its operations having moved out of Russia, those living in that country were still unable to read it.
Its editor-in-chief Dmitry Muratov, a Nobel Peace laureate, sold his medal to help Ukrainian refugees.
The newspaper’s was started in 1993 with funding from then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's Nobel peace prize.
Gorbachev’s death last month seemingly also left Putin cold and unmoved.
Putin’s dislike for the former statesman’s political and economic reforms and criticism of his war affairs in Ukraine are well known.
It seems the closure of a newspaper critical of Putin and his war efforts in Ukraine, funded by prize money from a man whose political leanings he clearly disliked, was inevitable.
We cannot afford to lose any voice and all South Africans should be standing up and clamouring for our right to be informed and our voices to be heard.
So why this column about the closure of an independent critical thinking investigative newspaper in a country so physically distant from SA? Its closure will surely not affect us as a country?
But it is the very action of the closure that should have us as a country sitting up with worry.
Why?
The silencing of any voice, whether friend or a foe, is something to guard against.
It is something that we are seeing happening right here, right now in SA.
The voice of News24 justice reporter Karyn Maughan is now being strangled by a man, whose close links to, and friendship with Putin, are well known.
Again why should we care?
Graft-embattled former president Jacob Zuma and Putin have shared many a good moment and laughs together and may well have traded notes on silencing critics.
Through the launch of a private prosecution against Maughan for doing her job, and reporting on his corruption trial, Zuma is attempting to silence her voice.
Zuma’s move mirrors that of Putin in silencing the voice of Novaya Gazeta, relied on by 27-million people for in-depth analysis and exposure of wrongdoing and corruption.
Last week News24 reported that Zuma was narrowly dissuaded from vying for the ANC national chairperson position, one of the most powerful positions within the party.
Zuma had told his audience — his supporters within the party — that he had been lobbied to contest for the position.
He has now thrown his weight behind his ex-wife, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, who is vying for president Cyril Ramaphosa’s position as ANC leader.
Who knows what Zuma’s role will be within the party should Dlamini-Zuma successfully succeed in her bid.
What is inevitable, though, is that the voices of reporters like Maughan and his critics will be in danger of being strangled.
The loss of any voice in SA poses a grave danger to our hard-wondemocracy.
It is what keeps our leaders on their toes and ensures that those who breach their sworn duties, and get caught dipping into the dwindling state purse, are given their day in court to account for their actions.
We cannot afford to lose any voice, and all South Africans should be standing up and clamouring for our right to be informed and our voices to be heard.
As Muratov said after the decision was announced, which he described as “information genocide”: “What you are doing is murder. You are depriving hundreds of people of jobs, of readers — there were 27-million in March — of the right to information.”
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