President Jacob Zuma. (Gallo)
Speaking off the cuff, President Jacob Zuma can be eerily mesmerising. Safety dictates, however, that he rarely go off-script in a public forum, because he holds some rather eclectic views and sometimes expresses them bizarrely. An example is his statement this week that reading South Africa's newspapers makes him want to flee the country.
He was speaking to journalism students visiting Cape Town to be awed by the workings of legislative government – and presumably to be inspired to do their best in their future roles in the South African media. But what Zuma said to the students could only mislead and confuse.
In Mexico, Zuma said, crime is not reported in the media because Mexican journalists (unlike their local counterparts, clearly) are patriotic and realise that nation-building and attracting foreign investment requires a certain degree of selective blindness. In this, he echoes media bosses such as Hlaudi Motsoeneng at the SABC and the Guptas, who claim they will patriotically provide such reporting. Whether Motsoeneng can, as he argues, produce a ratio of 70% good news to 30% bad without seriously distorting the plain truth about this country remains to be seen.
Zuma is also ignoring the fact that nation-building is more likely to accelerate if he can deliver on his party's promises, especially in areas such as education, employment, housing and services. He is neglecting to consider that foreign investment is more likely to come streaming into South Africa if his government provides a stable regulatory framework for capital, acts firmly on corruption and pre-empts or deals properly with events such as the Marikana massacre. No amount of cheery journalism is going to solve those problems.
At any rate, the president is wrong about why crime reporting in Mexico dropped. One media group there said earlier this year that it was halting all reporting on organised crime because it feared for the safety of its employees: many journalists have been tortured or murdered, or had family members who had been kidnapped, so they concluded crime reporting was simply too hazardous to their health.
Mr President, we're sure many of your fellow citizens too want to flee because of the crime, corruption, violence and fraud. But that probably doesn't make them despair quite as much as a president who believes that ignoring the truth will make it go away.