heat
It was bound to happen sooner rather than later: before it has even got around to setting an official date for next year’s general election, the government is sending out signals that it wants the “political heat” taken out of the electoral process and that it requires the services of the more compliant sectors of the news media to help it bring the thermometer readings down.
Among the evidence that these none-too- subtly coded signals are being read and understood, was a recently held conclave of managers and senior journalists in the Independent Newspapers stable. This gathering decided that the aims of its newspapers in covering the election should be to boost circulation figures, to educate voters in the lore of democracy and to keep the political thermostat at an acceptable level.
Clearly, the last of these aims is in conflict with its predecessors. For one does not induce the literate public to buy newspapers by taking “the heat” out of the news, anymore than one produces good democrats by making the world of political debate seem more comfortable than it really is. It is equally obvious that this talk of heat reduction is a euphemism for (at best) toning down reportage and comment on contentious issues and (at worst) doctoring political news to the point of distortion.
It is unthinkable, moreover, that those journalists and their managers, sailing under the flag of independence, would have opted for this course, had some of them not come under direct or indirect pressure emanating ultimately from the office of our Deputy President and President Nelson Mandela’s heir- apparent, Thabo Mbeki. Indeed, the really interesting question is not whether Mbeki allowed these pressures to be applied but why he did so.
Of course, it is true that post- liberation South Africa is still in a state of relative instability; that the African National Congress leadership is still comparatively inexperienced at manipulating the machinery designed to keep the state apparatus intact and that we live on a particularly violent and politically inflammable continent. But these factors are insufficient to explain the government’s anxieties.
Closer to the mark is the consideration that three decades of illegality, exile and clandestinity have provided a poor training for the practice of the democratic virtues of tolerance and trust in the wisdom of vox populi.
Indeed, the virtues prized during the long years of the ANC’s outlawry were and had to be the very opposite of what democracy requires – secrecy, unswerving loyalty to Oliver Tambo and the rest of the “old men” who were his tried and trusted lieutenants, and disciplined adherence to a chain of command.
At the time, these conditions were accepted by the average ANC member, because they appeared to be necessary means to a democratic end. Few were alive to the danger that authoritarian means might damage the goal.
There is, moreover, currently a school of belief among the ruling party’s analysts which holds that a low poll would favour the ANC, perhaps even securing it the two-thirds majority it needs to change the Constitution should it wish to do so. What better way of achieving this result than by inducing voter apathy by damping the fires of political controversy?
Yet, desirable as this upshot may seem to some, it really does not seem to me to be achievable by this route. The government will find – as did its predecessors – that journalists are by no means as pliable a bunch as it might wish them to be. It may succeed in getting some newspapers on which it has influence to fall in with its plans. It may manage to make its muscle felt in the corridors of the SABC.
But that is as far as Mbeki’s writ runs. The bulk of the print media will simply continue to report the political news and to allow free play to commentators in their opinion and correspondence columns within the limits set by the law.
Further, even in those newsrooms where ANC influence is most palpable, there are journalists who will go on trying to do their job, no matter what politicians and those they hold in thrall may say about it. Such media workers – even when they are staunch ANC supporters – have an ethic of their own. And that ethic tells them that, when they are at work, their first duty is not to this or that political group, not even to the company that pays their salaries, but to the consumers, who pay good money for their product in the belief that they will be better informed by so doing.
In the event, it does rather seem that the politicians would be best advised to mind their own business and leave the media to get on with its task in its own way. For there is no way to ensure that we have a tranquil election next year, nor is it at all likely that that is what we shall get. The 1994 poll was a mere dress rehearsal for the exercise in mass decision-making that awaits us.
In fact, all indications are that this is going to be the roughest election in the country’s history. It will be boisterous, even violent, especially in the townships and some of the rural areas. There will be cries of foul play and accusations of gross mismanagement. The patience, tact (and muscle) of the security forces are likely to be tested to the limit.
Yet this is part of what democratic processes, especially in developed and semi-developed countries, are all about. Mbeki knew this when he and the rest of the ANC leadership in exile opted for a negotiated settlement. Frankly, if we can’t take the heat now, we might as well get out of the electoral kitchen altogether and admit that all our pieties about bowing to the popular will were mere mouthings to impress potential foreign investors.
Mbeki and his cautious cronies in the media ought to show a little more faith in the maturity and wisdom of the millions of voters, whose struggles and sacrifices put the present government in power in the first place.
They may take comfort in the thought that, if such events as the prolonged Codesa bargaining, the violence in KwaZulu-Natal and the murder of Chris Hani did not cause this nation to dash itself to pieces, the friction generated by a free, fair and properly reported election is unlikely to do so now.
Anthony Holiday teaches philosophy at the University of the Western Cape’s school of government. Howard Barrell is on leave