FROM THE PUBLIC EDITOR'S DESK : Wanted: critical minds for critical times

        This year’s global theme for the World Press Freedom Day could be challenging. Read it. Critical Minds for Critical Times: Media’s role in advancing peaceful, just and inclusive societies.

The media’s role in advancing peaceful, just and inclusive societies has always been at the centre of activity by conscious women and men in the profession especially.

Come May 3, we celebrate the fundamental principles of press freedom; evaluate press freedom in our countries; pay tribute to journalists who lost their lives while on duty; and recite commitments to continued observation of freedom of expression.

What we keep reminding each other as a role, year in year out, is how to advance, which direction, with what messages and tools and at what speed; indeed taking into account all factors that could speed up, slow down or halt our forward movement.

We have not forgotten to inform the world citizens about violations of press freedom through censorship of publications, fines, suspension and even closure of media outlets.

We have continually reported arrest, remand, arraignment and even imprisonment of the already harassed, attacked and detained or imprisoned journalists and editors; and those murdered while on duty.

All that may seem to be ordinary and routine; and may have little or no impact at all on the things we do because it is always done by the same people, the same way, with the same expectations; and possibly with the same consequences.

But this year, we are treated at global level, to a “special diet” – Critical Minds for Critical Times; as phrasal prefix to media role which is the unending struggle for freedom of the press and its pinnacle – freedom of expression.

I am not obliged to think along the same lines with the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco); although I am not interested in parting ways with the informed and tested experience of the organisation.

This – “critical minds for critical times” – sends me back to those good, old days when I got to know the expression, “learning by rote.” Our teacher used to say, “I am teaching you, and you are learning by rote. It is good for you. You ignore it, you fail.”

It took us long before we discovered it was teaching by way of “mechanical repetition of something so that it is remembered; often without real understanding of its meaning or significance.”

So, it meant going by routine; by memorisation, by repetition and get things stuck in the head even without knowing or asking why.

It seems to me that Unesco’s call for “critical minds for critical times” is a call for departure from the ordinary; from the routine cries and presentations before those who commit crime against media and still walk away with it.

It tells me that crime against media is crime against world citizens; and it calls for concerted effort to combat callousness and impunity long exercised on silent world citizens. And this doesn’t need to be said by Unesco.

The call through this year’s WPFD theme sounds like the work of an activist, telling you and me – every media practitioner – to seek and acquire “disciplined thinking that is clear, rational, open-minded, and informed by evidence;” and in the equally well analysed conditions that form the “critical times.”

Indeed, this is the exact opposite of mechanical repetition of something so that it is remembered, often without real understanding of its meaning or significance.

It demands new thinking and analysis along this year’s theme to answer the following: How do you respond to an order to shut up and consequently to the citizens to shut up?

You giggle and look aside? You turn your back to the order and walk away the opposite direction? What do you do? You collect a khaki envelope and look away? You forget the fallen and fraternise with energisers of discord?

It demands critical minds for critical times. And, here are critical times.