South Africa: Common sense must prevail on media's independence [opinion]

Alarm bells that vividly race back to mind was that, come the midnight hour of December of that year, the first minute on the clock would get reduced down to four zeroes. Doomsayers were equally in full swing concocting obituaries for the world coming to an end. Delivering us from this gloom and doom was a scientific response and view that assured all and sundry that the world was far from coming to an end.

The Y2K Centre was even established to marshal the country's readiness to usher in the year 2000. The New Year came and the feared prophecy of the world turning tables upside down and wreaking havoc with people's banking accounts did not materialise.

 

And the sun did not rise in the west. Of importance to note is that there was a view that not only dismissed the nonsensical end of 1999 but also ensured that nothing went amiss.

 

The year 1999 does not escapes memory as this was the second year of my tenure as the general secretary general of the Forum of Black Journalists.

 

Hated by some for being a misfit in "nonracial" South Africa, the FBJ was also adored by others who saw it as black people's natural ability to give themselves permission to dream, think, plan and act in the direction that finally put to rest their powerlessness in the media arena and the rest of society.

 

In the FBJ black journalists not only had a home for a shared meaning and view of what reality was showing them, but also a platform for independent black thought and action on the media front.

 

In the make-up of a world view, the FBJ was a living facet of an experience out of which a black view had sprung to be in contention with other views.

 

Hurried to rule on the merit of its cause, the Human Rights Commission found the FBJ to be out of step with a nonracial South Africa.

 

The South African Editors Forum found the FBJ's existence displeasing and "problematic".

 

Why is it right for a black vote to be vied for by political parties only to be a problem when a black view thinks and speaks for itself?

 

The government, which in the main is black, did not find its way clear to take a public position.

 

The ANC general secretary Gwede Mantashe made a less than brave assertion regarding the FBJ's right to exist.

 

And when black journalists' right to association, assembly and organised expression of a black view was summarily frozen by the HRC, the ANC expressed no more than zero courage in its defence.

 

And those who had lodged the complaint with the HRC welcomed its order as a victory to a "non-racial" South Africa.

 

Had the FBJ not been throttled into the freezer of political correctness, the ANC would have had the comfort of knowing that under question is not the legality and legitimacy of a black government.

 

At issue is an independent media capable of dealing with black and white mischief, within and outside government, since both are two sides of the same corrupting coin that can sell the country down the road to a banana republic with a zero registration of critical common sense.

 

As brilliantly done in 1999, may the final hour that announces dead or alive media's independence leave us with our criminal common sense intact.

 

-August 31, 2010 by Oupa Ngwenya

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Source: www.sowetanlive.co.za/columnists/2010/08/31/common-sense-must-prevail-on-media_s-independence  (accessed on 31.08.10)