By unpacking and expanding on the contents, relevant stakeholders can formulate and adopt advocacy strategies towards the promotion and protection of these rights. IMPACT OF REGULATION RELATED TO COVID-19 Even before the spread of the virus on the continent, southern African countries implemented their partial and full lockdowns through a range of swiftly enacted regulations, orders, decrees or executive orders/ decrees. The governments of Botswana, South Africa, Eswatini and Zimbabwe hurriedly legislated laws criminalising the sharing of “false information”. (2) Mitigating against the constant harassment of journalists, the Zimbabwe chapter of the Media Institute of Southern Africa filed an urgent chamber application with the High Court seeking to put an end to the police harassment of accredited journalists. MISA Zimbabwe also went on to file an urgent application “compelling the government to publish and disseminate with immediate effect information on the private and public testing and treatment centres at national, provincial and district hospitals allocated for dealing with COVID-19 cases”. (6) The role of the media became indisputable and there were countries who of course recognised the media’s role as a primary disseminator of information and one of the pillars of support in curbing the spread of the pandemic. With just 16 confirmed cases in the country, Namibia’s ministries of Health and Information jointly launched the COVID-19 Communication Centre in April 2020, replete with scheduled daily press briefings during which journalists were given the opportunity to ask questions. (7) At this juncture — as all the issues came colliding together — journalists were forced into fighting a battle on many fronts. The shortcoming was that COVID-19 regulations allowed authorities to select who would be allowed to attend the press briefings. The media was trying to make sense of what was happening with the fluid and fast moving COVID-19 situation, while trying to keep themselves safe from contracting the virus with limited available resources. In a separate incident, the Namibian government was forced to apologise after private media journalists were forcefully barred from attending an opening of a COVID-19 facility by President Hage Geingob. (8) What became evident was the need for accurate news and information to help people stay informed and safe. South Africa was salient in how it creatively shared statistics and live daily updates, co-opting entertainment and Botswana was one of the first countries to institute a law that made it illegal to share COVID-19 information that had not been obtained from the director of Health Services or the World Health Organisation. (3) These restrictions were indiscriminately being used to threaten, intimidate, assault and arrest journalists covering the COVID-19 pandemic with Zimbabwe recording the highest number of violations. (4)(5) These initial attempts to cage access to information failed, as citizens demanded a deeper understanding of the global pandemic. Botswana media workers during a march STATE OF PRESS FREEDOM IN SOUTHERN AFRICA REPORT 2021 7 The reinforcement of rights and outlining of ideals are an antidote to governments’ tendencies to utilise laws and policies that unjustifiably restrict the right to freedom of expression and access to information.