Ferial Haffajee
A senior SABC radio executive has resigned from a strategic elections committee amid staff fears of African National Congress interference at the broadcaster.
Franz Kruger, the national news and current affairs editor, quit the elections team when a story he wrote which painted a picture of dwindling ANC support provoked a heated response from Solly Mokoetle, the head of the SABC’s election coverage.
Mokoetle is also the former head of Radio Freedom, the ANC’s radio station in exile. He was one of the ruling party’s first deployments to the broadcaster.
Reports suggest that Mokoetle blew his cool at an SABC radio line-talk where senior journalists review and plan coverage.
He doesn’t attend the line-talk but made an unscheduled appearance to publicly object to Kruger’s angle on the results of a poll conducted by the SABC, Markinor and the Institute for a Democratic South Africa.
He complained that the SABC looked stupid because radio and television had run completely different angles on the poll, which found that the apathetic vote had jumped significantly.
Kruger – an Eastern Cape journalist who started a progressive regional news agency in the Eighties – extrapolated the results to suggest losses for the ANC, while television chose to focus on the growth of the apathy vote.
Some SABC insiders alleged that Mokoetle had received a call from the ANC and was relaying the message.
But others say that the spat was just a public rupture of simmering corporate tension between Kruger and Mokoetle. “He [Mokoetle] raised it in a kak way,” said a journalist about the outburst, adding that despite his manner, he may have had a point.
SABC editors had been carefully briefed to treat the poll as a barometer of perception and not as fact and it was this point he was trying to ram home.
Neither Kruger nor Mokoetle would comment this week. Said Mokoetle: “It’s an internal discussion among SABC managers.”
In a pre-election phase, the broadcaster becomes hotly contested terrain. Its coverage will only be monitored by the Independent Broadcasting Authority from the day after the president declares an election date.