the passing of President Geingob will assure the global and local business community that the country remains an attractive investment destination (Duddy, 2024). under regulations of the Communications Act of 2009. A technology expert, Paul Rowney, also questioned why MITC harvested biometric data under the pretext of SIM registration, as well as under false pretenses. (8) State surveillance, Namibia’s new frontier However, there are no guarantees that this data will be discarded, given that CRAN has demanded that MTC stops forthwith with the collection of biometric data. (9) The country’s free press environment as per the latest rankings does not take into consideration the risk journalists in Namibia face, of the possibility of censorship and state surveillance. As things stand, the media has been forced to hold on to assurances by the Namibian government, CRAN and the Parliamentary Standing Committee on ICT that citizens’ private information would not be used to spy on them. While Namibia has not recorded incidents of attacks on journalists for the period under review, a decision by the Communications Regulatory Authority of Namibia (CRAN) for compulsory registration of their SIM cards registered has sparked fears of unwarranted surveillance. (10) The CRAN chief executive officer said unless a court order is obtained through the relevant procedures stipulated in legislation, there would not be any mass surveillance of public members. This is despite the reasoning provided by government for enforced registration that it is meant to combat crime and reinforce cyber security in line with Section 77 of the Communications Act. (5) The major argument from the government of Namibia was that this information would be needed to clamp down on criminal activities and nothing more. The decision followed consultations by the minister of Information and Communication Technology, with CRAN and the director-general of the Namibia Central Intelligence Service (NCIS) on the regulations setting the framework for this exercise. By the 29th of February 2024, Namibia had a total of 2 387 230 active SIM cards, from which a total of 1 687 742 had been successfully registered, representing a registration rate of 70,6 percent. MTC commenced its SIM card registration with the collection of biometric data, raising concerns that this may be used by the state for surveillance. By the beginning of April and after the registration deadline, 300 000 SIM card users including journalists were cut off by MTC, the country’s leading telecommunications company. The collection of biometric data has seen a breach of directives from CRAN, particularly as the MTC has brazenly violated legal requirements mandating the collection of only basic information such as an ID card or passport and an address. Subsequently all Namibians with unregistered MTC SIM cards could not make calls at work and neither could they do online banking transactions using e-Wallet. (11) Editor’s suspension at New Era causes uproar As such, the right to privacy is under threat and has the possibility of sliding Namibia backwards on the global media rankings going forward. (6) This has been echoed by research associate at the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), Frederico Links, who submitted that compulsory SIM card registration, mandatory data retention and biometrics harvesting would infringe on the country’s human rights standards. (7) The extent to which Namibia’s state-controlled media can practice their craft without undue interference, came to the fore when the New Era newspaper decided to suspend its managing editor, Jonathan Beukes, in September 2023. (12) Beukes had penned an opinion article criticising a lack of transparency by the country’s judiciary on 29 September 2023. In his article, Links further argued that perpetual mass surveillance [would] become the norm as mandatory SIM card registration and data retention are fully operationalised In it, Beukes had questioned why the judicial 63 STATE OF PRESS FREEDOM IN SOUTHERN AFRICA 2023