20110208
africanews

On the heels of a new media law that gives power to the minister of information and civic education to ban any publication deemed to be operating contrary to the "wishes" of the people, police arrested a journalist last Sunday. Award winning journalist, Kondwani Kamiyala, was picked taking photographs of the law enforcers administering police brutality during a musical show.

During the music launch album by one of Malawi’s top afro centric musicians, Skeffa Chimoto in the commercial city of Blantyre, Kamiyala took photographs of several officers pounding a suspected thief. They turned onto him and demanded that he deletes all the pictures.

“The thief was spotted by Anjiru Fumulani – of the popular reggae outfit, Black Missionaries – who alerted people around. He was apprehended and the police came on the scene,” a witness, John Selemu, explained.

He said the police started beating the thief harshly in full view of the people, including Kamiyala and several other media colleagues from other media houses.

“Kamiyala quickly fished out his digital camera and started taking pictures of the police beating up the helpless thief,” said Selemu. Kamiyala, working for the privately owned Nation Newspaper and also a well-known poet, refused to delete the pictures and was taken away, handcuffed, unless he deleted the tale-telling pictures.

Another journalist, Kandani Ngwira working for the same newspaper was also arrested by police around January 10. However, in a dramatic turn of events it transpired that the arrest on a Monday for allegedly sending a ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislator "threatening messages” was a case of "mistaken identity".

Ngwira's lawyer Wapona Kita said police investigations traced the messages to a mobile phone belonging to one Harold Kaumphawi. Kaumphawi was subsequently traced and arrested and, like Ngwira, was charged with "conduct likely to cause breach of peace".

Section 46 of the Penal Code says: ‘if the minister has reasonable grounds to believe that the publication or importation of any publication would be contrary to the public interest, he may, by order published in the Gazette, prohibit the publication or importation of such a publication’.

The international community, including German and the US, have since reacted on the bill, among many other bad governance issues in the country. The International Press Institute (IPI), a global network of editors, media executives and leading journalists, has also added weight in condemning president Bingu wa Mutharika's administration for enacting the publications ban law.

“The amendment of this antiquated and repressive law could mean that the Malawi authorities now intend to censor the local press,” acting director, Alison Bethel McKenzie, told the local Daily Times on Monday.

Mutharika is on record to have given the police extra powers in handling those they feel are against the law. In one of his official statements last month the president said ‘anyone who slapped a police officer would draw his direct wrath’.
He was speaking in reference to thugs whom he ordered the police to shoot and kill and road users who sometimes refuse strange demands by the traffic police.

The president is also on record for having threatened to close any newspaper that talked negative about his government.

"I will close any newspaper that writes to 'tarnish' the good image of my government and the progressive development that we are experiencing," he charged.