Ronald Suresh Roberts : Crossfire
In an unprecedented and conspicuously fact-free attack on the personal integrity of Deputy President Thabo Mbeki (“A short leap to dictatorship”, March 27 to April 2), Lizeka Mda explicitly elevates what she herself calls “urban legend”, “rumours” and “perception” to the realm of serious political analysis. To her, Mbeki is a man “seeking to usurp all powers” and is analogous to bantustan leaders like Kaizer Matanzima, nogal.
Halfway through her fanciful jeremiad against the looming Mbeki dictatorship, reason briefly taps Mda on the shoulder. She muses that her attack “could be dismissed as just rumours, but then again there is no smoke without fire”. Where Mda is concerned, there is no smoke without mirrors. “Mbeki is reported to have summoned a prominent member of the National Empowerment Consortium in 1996 to impress upon that member that under no circumstances should Cyril Ramaphosa – who was perceived to have been Mbeki’s rival for the deputy presidency – be allowed to take control of Johnnic’s media assets,” she writes. The only place in which these alleged “facts” were reported was a fact-free opinion piece on the leader page of Business Day. Thus one newspaper’s opinion page innuendo is recycled in another newspaper as allegedly “reported” fact. No smoke without mirrors.
Interestingly, Mda combines her hallucinations about Mbeki with an attack on the Independent Broadcasting Authority’s (IBA) award of the mother of all post-apartheid media prizes, the free-to-air television licence. When the media themselves report on lucrative media prizes, readers better beware. Direct and indirect alliances, friendships and conflicts of interest abound. The righteous passions of columnists cohabit with unrighteous personal self-interest. Mda herself, despite posturing as a neutral commentator, has a direct personal affiliation with one of the failed free-to-air television bids, as a member of its advisory board. She failed to disclose this personal interest and carefully timed her article to appear on the eve of the IBA’s decision. Again, no smoke without mirrors.
The real issue raised by Mda’s column, therefore, is not the political integrity of the deputy president, but the journalistic integrity of one who now carries the dubious distinction of being Mbeki’s noisiest black critic. Left unremedied, the abuse into which she has drawn her newspaper would strike at the heart of the editorial integrity of the Mail & Guardian itself. Mda is the paper’s own in-house Don Mkhwanazi. We trust the editor will not dither on his wicket as Minister Penuell Maduna so deplorably has on his.
But this goes beyond ineptitude of individual pundits. Kader Asmal referred recently to the British film, Shallow Grave, in which a journalist is assigned by his unsuspecting editor to report on the discovery of a body that the journalist himself buried in a forest. It is with such smoke and mirrors that much of the media establishment, structurally rooted in the past, reports on the politics of the present, and specifically on the issues involved in broadcast policy reform.
For instance: lost amid all the hysteria about imminent media dictatorship, is any sober assessment of the performance of the IBA itself. Fans of independent bodies like the IBA say such bodies have management and technical expertise that insulate their decisions from short-term political vagaries, while advancing long-term societal goals. Detractors say these bodies were an attempt by the outgoing National Party to tie the hands of the incoming democrats. Whatever the merits of these contending views, these institutions are meant to be tools, not religious idols. Necessary debate over whether the IBA has been a good tool and how its workings might be improved is not advanced by commentators like Mda who explicitly cites “the rumour mill” as an authority in debates over institutional – and even constitutional – development.
Mda’s accusation of looming dictatorship is nothing less than a suggestion that Mbeki is intent on subverting (or already has subverted) the constitution. Mda explicitly accuses Mbeki, in cahoots with unnamed “fat cats”, of “supplanting democratic institutions with patronage to one man”. We expect such idiotic suggestions from the likes of “Suiker” Britz and the old guard at military intelligence, but this is (or ought to be) out of place in the opinion pages of the M&G.
In consecutive sentences, Mda contradicts herself: “We could be creating a monster. This is not to paint Mbeki as a demon.” She goes on: “Soon there won’t be a need even for ministries, except to rubber stamp decisions that have already been made. Those who worry about a one-party state should contemplate the spectre of a one-man show. There’s a name for that: dictatorship.” In her self-interested anti-Mbeki scaremongering, Mda echoes reactionaries like Hermann Giliomee, who wrote in the Cape Times in February 1996 that “the excessive dominance of the African National Congress may well turn us into a variant of a one-party dominant regime”.
Previously, this view was the voice of neurotic Eurocentrism, part of a pathology that might be called Eurosis. With Mda’s embrace of such rhetoric, Afro-pessimism loses its whites-only face. It is revealing and instructive that the first notable black critic to embrace liberal Afro-pessimism, should do so in a brazenly self-interested context.
As Afro-pessimism begins to attract self-seeking blacks, we must innoculate the culture of public debate against ubiquitous mental imagery of black barbarism. This racialised imagery lurks close to the surface of post-apartheid discourse and is easily deployed by white reactionaries and black opportunists alike. Mda’s contribution to a rainbow-nation brand of Afro-pessimism brings to mind JM Coetzee’s novel, Foe. There, a European narrator observes the alleged ex-cannibal Friday – now dancing civilised in wigs and robes – and wonders: “Is it not only a matter of time before the new Friday whom Cruso created is sloughed off and the old Friday of the cannibal forests returns?” Such anxiety sums up the Eurotic mindset, which gives articles like Mda’s an intuitive veneer of credibility with certain readers.
The good news is that these attitudes are crumbling. Nelson Mandela, formerly the bloodthirsty terrorist of Thatcherite lore, is now globally feted. Business Day’s Tim Cohen complained, early in Trevor Manuel’s tenure as finance minister, that Manuel was as crude as “a Cape Flats streetfighter”. It took over a year, but Manuel’s true merits now shine through this fog of prejudice. Similarly, as Mbeki gets set to take the presidency, there is a predictable burst of racialised innuendo, scarcely dignified by any pretence of fact. Such are the joys of transition.