South Africa: ANC’s media clampdown is not the leopard changing his spots [opinion]

TWENTY years ago this month the South African Institute of Race Relations organised a seminar whose proceedings were published under the title Mau-Mauing the Media: New Censorship for the New SA. Among the speakers were several prominent journalists.

They described the terror to which they were subjected if they criticised school boycotts and other coercive strategies that formed part of the “people’s war” launched by the African National Congress (ANC) and its allies to gain power. Some were so scared they referred to the ANC only as “a certain organisation”.

 

Now that the revolutionaries are in power, terrorisation of the kind recently visited upon a Sunday Times reporter is (so far) the exception, not the rule.

 

Censorship legislation and media tribunals will be much more widely deployed to silence critics.

 

Yet it is striking how surprised many journalists seem to be about the proposed clampdowns.

 

How, one editorial asks, could a party of such “noble traditions” as the ANC do this to the press?

 

The current attack on media freedom by the ANC and the South African Communist Party (SACP), we are informed by another editor, “is consistent with the core values of neither party”. Not too many communist parties in history can have received such an accolade.

 

These claims about noble traditions and core values can be made only by airbrushing out the history of the people’s war and/or embracing the view that the leopard has changed his spots. To make such claims also necessitates turning a blind eye to the ANC’s continued — and indeed advertised — commitment to a “national democratic revolution”.

 

It would be a mistake to assume that the present wave of hostility to the press arises only from recent exposés of corruption, though these have intensified that hostility.

 

The antagonism of both the ANC and the SACP to critical newspapers is deeper. It is ideological.

 

Back in 1997 at a conference in Mafikeng, then president Nelson Mandela depicted the media as having “set itself up as a force opposed to the ANC”. The conference adopted a document in which it described itself as the vanguard of the national democratic revolution. Though the party noted it had significant support in the media, it also said most editorial rooms were not sympathetic either to the ANC or to the national democratic revolution.

 

More had to be done to win the “battle of ideas”, inter alia by implementing a “cadre policy (aimed at) ensuring that the ANC plays a leading role in all centres of power”, both within the government and in key structures of civil society.

 

Two years later an article in the ANC journal Umrabulo blamed continued press criticism of the government on “weak cadre deployment policies” and “failure to prioritise the transforming of key ideological centres, such as universities, the privately owned media, and private research and policy institutes”.

 

Eight years down the road at the ANC’s Polokwane conference in 2007 some of this thinking was translated into the resolutions to establish a statutory tribunal and otherwise curtail media freedom.

 

Some of the criticism the ANC has levelled against the media is justified. Some is probably shared by more people than the media would like to admit. But the two ruling parties’ ambition goes beyond remedying obvious defects. It is to turn the media into an instrument of the national democratic revolution.

 

There has never been any secret about this and the journalists who find it so surprising have simply failed to be vigilant enough.

 

Business, with the acquiescence of most of the media, has to a large extent been turned into an instrument of black economic empowerment, which is also part of the national democratic revolution agenda. If the media are brought to heel, renewed efforts to “transform” the judiciary (including making it less willing to set aside government decisions) and subordinate civil society will move up the agenda.

 

Perhaps it is time to write less about noble traditions and more about the national democratic revolution.

 

And to recognise that one of the ruling parties’ stated core objectives is a compliant media.

 

- Kane-Berman is CE of the South African Institute of Race Relations.

 

 -August 16, 2010 by John Kane-Berman

 

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Source: www.businessday.co.za/Articles/Content.aspx (accessed on 16.08.10)