South Sudan committed to promote freedom of expression
April 6, 2007 (JUBA) — The minister of information and broadcasting of the government of Southern Sudan, Samson Kwaje, reiterated yesterday his government’s commitment to promoting the freedom of expression and speech throughout the country.
Speaking at the closing ceremony of the two-day southern Sudan roundtable workshop on freedom of expression, the minister said that the government is committed to establishing a democratic and an independent broadcasting authority in southern Sudan.
He envisioned that they would be challenges in the process towards democratic transformation. He said, however, that the government and the SPLM would overcome those challenges in their endeavours to make southern Sudan a liberal and democratic region.
The minister called on the members of the Union of Journalists and Association of Media Development in Southern Sudan (AMDISS) to collaborate with the ministries and members of the August house to pass the proposed bills for the establishment of the Southern Sudan Broadcasting Authority into law.
Kwaje advised journalists to cooperate with lawmakers in drafting and passing the proposed bill.
(Khartoum Monitor)
Akoch Akoch
South Sudan committed to promote freedom of expression
Creating a democratic South Sudan is foremost a welcomed idea of the government’s decision in its potentiallity to promote transparency amongst the people of South Sudan, but what I object is freedom of speech in South Sudan. This is because of these reasons:
1. South Sudan is at its genesis of development and implementations
In a situation like this, we don’t need to expose our plans and weaknesses to the whole world. This will resulted to us being incompetent to rule ourselves as they go preaching always on their so called websites and radios.
2. South Sudan is still vulnorable at this stage.
our government is still not stable, thersfore it’s not freedom of media that will make us overtake the rest of the world. We are belittle ourselves in most of ways. Our people are not yet civilized, they are not yet educated and they don’t yet understands the so called government, so giving the media a license to be pablishing freely will be our downfall in many differents ways
You can all see now that people went far to the point of exposing confidential informations of some individuals, simply because they don’t know the information to pablish and which not to report.
Media should not be our first priority in the GoSS, we first need to educate our people on certain vital things that promote deplomacy and civilisation.
3. freedom of speech is our second and most dangerous war
All of will notice that with the freedom of expression, we are betraying ourselves/our poteniallity to our foes and nothing we will acheive in that. we will just be talking people and coruption which is a very depromoting news as is always found on the news papper. There is a very big corruption all over the world but it is not the news that eradicates it. It’s the people through workshops who fight it to death. Workshops and initiatives in solving issues in the nation are better than exposure of the nation affairs to the whole world.
If freedom of expression is to prevail, the government in the South need to control it closely, otherwise all Southerners will be seen by the whole world as incapable to rule themselves.
The August House has to consider that turning the inside out of our country and our cultures is going to be our weakness for the current and the next generation to come.
The Western world is very much insisting that the GoSS approves the freedom of expression Bill so that they will be able fully learn more about us while we in the Sudan don’t know more about them.
Akoch Akoch
Akoch is a university student in Autralia and can be reached at [email protected]