53 SOUTHERN AFRICA PRESS FREEDOM REPORT 2019-2020 muzzle journalists’ freedoms and rights to practice their trade without undue influence. The situation has continued to deteriorate in 2020 with media reports suggesting that Namibian journalists have endured intimidation, manhandling by police and state security as well as verbal attacks by politicians. The first case involves Edward Mumbuu, a journalist at the Namibia Press Agency who was publicly castigated by President Hage Geingob after he asked the president whether he was going to distance himself from his personal lawyer pending corruption allegations against him. Another case involved Jemima Beukes (from the Namibian Sun) and Charmaine Ngatjiheue from The Namibian, (99) who were manhandled by the president’s security detail at the Windhoek Central Hospital where President Geingob was officially opening an isolation facility for Covid-19 patients. The two journalists have since filed an assault charge against the police VIP Protection Directorate. ONLINE FREEDOM Namibia respects the rights of citizens online. The country has yet to experience internet shutdowns or throttling despite the political economy of the telecommunications sector, where the government owns total shareholding in the major internet service providers. (100) At the height of Covid-19, the government has come up with state of emergency regulations, which criminalised the intentional spreading of “fake news”. (101) According to the regulations, people publishing any false or misleading statement in connection with the coronavirus disease on social media, are committing an offense for which they can be fined up to N$2000 (about US$135) or be given a prison term of up to six months. Although article 13 of Namibia’s constitution protects the right to privacy, there are several controversial clauses in other laws that impact on communications privacy. There is also evidence that the state engages in communications surveillance despite the fact that key provisions in its main interceptions law (the Communications Act of 2009) are not yet in operation. (102) MEDIA AND GENDER Article 10 of the Namibian constitution provides for “equality and freedom from discrimination” for its citizens. Furthermore, the constitution protects citizens’ rights to human dignity, noting in article 8 sub-article 1, that “the dignity of all persons shall be inviolable”. These provisions imply that all Namibians, including women, must be treated equally and with dignity in all spheres of life including in, through and by the media. There seems to be a paucity of information about the positions and experiences of women in the newsroom in Namibia. This is a huge anomaly considering that the country records significant levels of gender-based violence such as rape, domestic violence, sexual harassment and forced marriages, every year. (103) As intimated earlier, the same patterns of violence get reproduced in the media sphere as exemplified by the police’s manhandling of two female journalists, Charmaine Ngatjiheue and Jemima Beukes. Anecdotal evidence also indicates that misogyny is an entrenched and toxic culture in the country’s newsrooms where male journalists dominate leadership positions in the media. This situation is compounded by huge salary gaps between editors and journalists which, by deduction, implies that female journalists are generally poorly paid as they do not belong to the privileged editorial elite, in the main. ACCESS TO INFORMATION The 2020 World Press Freedom Report ranks Namibia first in Africa and 23rd in the world, in terms of press freedom, a key ingredient of democratic politics. (104) This is because article 21 of the Namibian constitution guarantees ”freedom of the press and other media”, which right “is often defended by the courts when under attack from other quarters within the state or by vested interests”. A significant development noted by the report is when Namibia’s Supreme Court “ruled in 2019 that the government could not use national security as a pretext for preventing the courts from deciding whether the media could reveal certain information,” in a case that involved the country’s intelligence services. (105) However, despite a protracted process aimed at passing the Access to Information Bill into law, Namibia still does not have a law that guarantees access to publicly held information by the media.