As a long-time ardent admirer of Govin Reddy may I add my humble voice to his own stridulations in regard to his having missed out on the top SABC sinecure. What is more disturbing is how the SABC board itself is also in the business of missing out, in Mr Reddy’s case, on a critically endangered talent. There can be few more visibly advantageous administrative titans a-sniffing at Zwelakhe Sisulu’s vacating shoes than Govin Reddy.
Let me not to self-regard admit impediment, as that overrated Eurocentric scribbler Shakespeare once said. Here’s what I once said about Govin Reddy.
At the time I was describing Govin’s magnum opus, the instant audience -diminishing populist radio station he created out of the ashes of the old English Service. I quote myself with a shrug.
“It’s called SAfm and was recently glowingly described by one friendly commentator as an `audible shithouse’. What’s more, a stereophonic one. Personally deprived by Guru Govin Reddy of any residual English grammar, poncey BBC accents and many other pretensions to dated colonial values, SAfm stands as a world leader when it come to militant philistinism.”
Why, I now contend, is the SABC board ignoring the promotional cravings of one of its most faithful – I was going to say “retainers” there but then I realised you can’t really call someone a “retainer” when he’s only been with an outfit about three and a half weeks. (I’m talking actual office time here. We all know Govin’s been pop-riveted to the SABC for far longer than that. It’s all those Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) hearings, union meetings and blow- wavings that keep him out in the roadstead.)
You have only to recall a fragment of Govin Reddy’s singularly candid political calibration in order to realise just how myopic the SABC board was being, ignoring him in favour of an obscure umfundisi of no fixed political abode.
Listen to this, from a television interview shortly after Govin, with revisionist glee, had imploded the SABC symphony orchestra. On a Sunday-evening Agenda programme Govin survived a gut-wrenching Penny Smythe broadside by wobbling slightly and then delivering a agreeably virginal definition of the term “politically correct”(PC). In order to be PC, Govin informed us, “SABC radio must both be a reflection and serve the interests of whoever won the last election”.
Are you telling me the SABC board purposefully overlooked a mind of such intricate quilt? Or was some other calendar in play?
There are two distinct possibilities. The first is simply that, if it appointed Govin Reddy as SABC supremo, the board members feared they might be fostering a clandestine stratagem – we can only hope not hatched by Jay Naidoo – the objective of which would be the control of all South African and, ultimately, African telecommunications and broadcasting by the Indian Illuminati.
One’s first reaction to that conjecture is, of course, outrage at its racist spite. As a conspiracy theory, though, it shows great promise and warrants prompt investigation by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). It would fit in nicely with political iniquities of similar texture presently being furtively scrutinised by that body.
Like the recent one where the TRC has been pondering how an entire South African Airways flight crew obediently crashed their jumbo jet into the sea in order to save Armscor and Magnus Malan from embarrassment.
The other possible reason the SABC board pissed all over Govin’s ambitions could just be that reliable standby, affirmative action (AA).
If this was indeed the case, that Govin Reddy was sidelined because his appointment would have exceeded the Tito Mboweni-approved ratio of Indian-to-African-empowering appointments, then a lurid irony insists. In South Africa you have to search diligently to find a more impatient champion of AA than Govin Reddy’s radio stations.
Quite (politically) correctly it’s all employment equity up at the Auckland Gallows. Will Bernard has actually learnt to say “affirmative action” without choking on his glottal mucous halfway through.
If Govin Reddy believes – as he appears to do in his public anguish – that the Reverend Hawu Mbatha got the SABC CEO job because he is an African, then Govin’s got no one to blame more thoroughly than himself.
Personally I underwrite Govin Reddy’s thermal huff. His emphatic political profile was there for all to see. Race should not have come into it. He is above this petty juncture.
You have only to look at that traditional Ndebele-designed portable radio he insists on being photographed next to, in order to know Govin’s as African as the rest of us.