THE government’s decision to ignore a recommendation by its own task team that the South African Communications Service (Sacs) be shut down has wider implications than the waste of taxpayers’ money. The move gives rise for concern about what could be in store for South Africa under a Thabo Mbeki presidency.
The case for the closure of Sacs was so self-evident that the government opened itself to a charge of waste from the moment it decided to commission an inquiry into its future.
The agency – the successor to the Department of Information, of Muldergate infamy – is historically discredited. Its contribution to the flow of information is limited largely to the organisation of occasional cocktail parties, an annual parliamentary briefing week for domestic and foreign correspondents, and the publication of a crude directory of contacts for journalists. Hardly enough to justify a staff of 300 and a budget of some R50-million.
So why is the deputy president’s office so anxious to keep it going? The answer seems self-evident: he and his advisers are nursing the fantasy of centralised control of information pertaining to the workings of the government. In other words, they would like to say what the public is allowed to know – a common enough dream among the politically powerful, but one which runs completely contrary to the ethos of our Constitution.
There is much to be admired about Mbeki, and much to be hoped for when he succeeds Nelson Mandela. Among other things, he has shown himself to be a man of some vision where the future of this continent is concerned. It is a vision he articulated again this week in a (rare) newspaper interview in which forecast a “renaissance” for Africa. “Essentially, our role is to lead by example,” he said of South Africa’s contribution to that renaissance.
We could not have said it better.