NATIONAL OVERVIEW 2017 A FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION lthough South Africa’s Constitution protects freedom of expression and media freedom, the country labours under an assessment by the New Yorkbased Freedom House that the nation and its media are only “partly free”. The extent of the decline from the status of “free” which it had enjoyed after the African National Congress (ANC) took over from the apartheid government in 1994, was spelled out by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) at a conference in Durban on 7 June 2017. The Board of WAN-IFRA expressed concern that a decade after the Declaration of Table Mountain was adopted by the World Editors’ Forum Conference in Cape Town in 2007, conditions for media freedom in South Africa had deteriorated, with the government considering a range of measures that would intimidate the press, promote self-censorship and silence criticism. The country’s political and social atmosphere was described as being “toxic” by an official of the Eastern Cape African National Congress (ANC), the national ruling party, with faction-fighting in the ANC and the main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance; the prevalence of fake news especially in social media and the heavy stench of corruption and state capture by private individuals, politicians, state officials and corporate interests. 88 So This is Democracy? 2017 The depth and breadth of state capture – defined as the looting of state resources by politically-connected individuals - is widely acknowledged. The friendship of President Jacob Zuma and the business association of his son Duduzane with a wealthy Indian immigrant family, the Guptas, resulted in them being accused of state capture with the tacit approval of Zuma. They were accused of influencing presidential appointments, of having knowledge of cabinet appointments before they were officially announced and even offering cabinet posts to ANC MPs. A few weeks before the year ended, former investigative reporter Jacques Pauw published a blockbuster of a book exposing criminal and corrupt conduct that he says brought South Africa to the brink of a mafia state. The book, entitled The President’s Keepers, Those Keeping Zuma in Power and Out of Prison, confirmed much of what had been published in newspapers and was rapidly sold out, resulting in an urgent reprint. Print Media The print media had a tough year with attacks by police on journalists covering protests, obstruction by the police of journalists and photographers at crime and accident scenes - in the process flouting their own Standing Order 156 which regulates their conduct in public treatment of the media and at crime scenes - as well as threats made to journalists on assignment by demonstrators and members of the public. There were demonstrations and pickets outside journalists’ homes, death threats levelled at Sipho Masondo of City Press, former SABC journalist Vuyo Mvoko and Sunday Times’ Mzilikazi wa Afrika; theft of mobile phones and equipment while on assignment, with photographers the