R2K Campaign Call to Defend Parliament from the Securocrats!
13 February 2015
The Right2Know Campaign condemns the use of the military to surround the Parliament, the use of security (allegedly the police) to suppress dissenting voices inside the Parliamentary Chamber, and the jamming of internet and cellphone signals during last night's State of the Nation Address.
It is clear that these attacks on our democracy have - at the very least - been tolerated by the presiding officers in Parliament. We cannot allow the presiding officers in Parliament to become complicit in the process of undermining our freedom as they did last night.
It appears increasingly that the State can't or won't govern by consent and are prepared to govern by increasingly authoritarian means.
It is an undeniable reality that the hands of the securocrats appear to be everywhere. As Business Day has pointed out, just last Sunday, Zuma "told a gathering of editors and journalists that he saw no problem with revelations that the State Security Agency (SSA) was [allegedly] monitoring the movements and communication of journalists in order to identify their sources and report to senior ANC politicians like Mpumalanga Premier David Mabuza".