SECTOR 1 it”. Impoverished communities that protest against their plight are said to have been instigated by agents provocateurs and often subjected to physical harm by the police. Police often over-react. In 2009, for example, a student who was jogging along a highway in Cape Town was accused of showing the middle finger to a convoy transporting President Zuma (“Blue Light Brigade”). He was bundled into a police car, interrogated for hours, forced to sign an apology and only released after a public outcry. In a more ominous case of what the paper’s editor termed “detention without trial”, a journalist with the Sunday Times was arrested without a warrant by eight plain-clothes policemen in a heavy-handed manner in July 2010, for the possession of an allegedly forged letter from the Premier of the Mpumalanga province. The journalist was kept in police cells overnight and interrogated, and his notebooks and other papers were confiscated. This police action followed a wave of verbal attacks by the ANC against the media after newspapers had revealed a number of alleged incidents of corruption involving government officials, and came a day after the National Police Commissioner had called the arrested reporter “a shady journalist”. Whistleblowers feel increasingly insecure: there are reports of people who had revealed instances of corruption to the press being threatened or even killed. Cases in this regard are presently being investigated by police. There is suspicion that “spooks are everywhere”. Many citizens believe “that people are listening into phones and listening to conversations”, as COSATU’s General Secretary Zwelinzima Vavi put it in July 2010. The National Intelligence and other secret services are alleged to be involved in the interception communications, including SMSs and e-mails. A lot of people do not make their voices heard, even if they have serious grievances. Often they can only complain and exercise their rights if they are able to do so in English which is a minority language. Citizens who run businesses are often silenced by patronage because in many regions their only potential customers or clients are government departments. Community radio stations, often the only readily available public space for ordinary citizens to voice their views and criticisms, are cautious because in many cases their revenue comes almost exclusively from government advertisements or programmes sponsored by government departments. During the anti-apartheid struggle civil society in communities was well organised. Since the ANC came into in power, this kind of organisation has dissipated to a large degree and the former liberation movement has been attempting to centralise public opinion under its banner and represent itself as the ‘voice of the people’. The majority of the population has un-learnt the habit of active participation and waits passively for service delivery in all aspects of their lives. AFRICAN MEDIA BAROMETER SOUTH AFRICA 2010 13