Howard Barrell
Opposition leaders have united in a bitter row with the African National Congress over a government publicity campaign which they say is promoting the ANC and threatening to undermine the integrity of the coming elections.
The heads of the opposition parties – the New National Party, Democratic Party, Pan Africanist Congress, African Christian Democratic Party and Freedom Front – are expected to announce a joint response in Johannesburg onMarch 5 to what they consider flagrant abuse of the letter and spirit of South Africa’s Constitution and electoral law, as well as of democratic norms.
At the centre of their concerns is a spate of publicity initiatives on television, radio and in the print media by the Government Communication and Information Service (GCIS) in recent weeks detailing what are referred to as the government’s achievements over the past five years.
The GCIS is headed by Joel Netshitenzhe, one of the ANC’s propaganda chiefs during its years in exile, who remains a senior figure in the party.
President Nelson Mandela has also been drawn into the row. DP leader Tony Leon is understood to have written to him on Thursday expressing his deep concern and appealing to the head of state’s sense of fairness and commitment to democratic practice. Leon and other opposition leaders want Mandela to order an immediate end to the GCIS campaign.
Netshitenzhe has rejected the charge that the GCIS is making propaganda on behalf of the ruling party.
Meanwhile, Daryl Swanepoel, a NNP MP and senior aide to the party’s leader, Marthinus van Schalkwyk, has written to the Independent Electoral Commission, Human Rights Commission and Independent Broadcasting Authority demanding action over the GCIS campaign.
The latest project in the campaign by the GCIS is a set of radio “infomercials” – each planned to take up a 15-minute slot – which are projected as government achievements over the past five years. A transcript of one of the new series of the GCIS programmes, is in the Mail & Guardian’s possession. The programmes are compiled out of briefings by government ministers to the media in February.
Netshitenzhe told the M&G this week that the GCIS was mandated by the government to communicate to the public the government’s efforts to transform the country.
“What the GCIS is doing here is to disseminate information from the president’s state of the nation address and ministers’ briefings to the media in February. The Constitution obliges the government to inform the public about its activities and the GCIS is the structure tasked with doing so.
“It is not the first time that these speeches and briefings are being reproduced in one form or another by a government communication structure,” he said.
“We do acknowledge that the opposition parties will not be enthused about information on South Africa which does not contain their own negative campaign. They have the right to engage the content of our publications, but they should not seek to censor government on what it can say to the public,” Netshitenzhe added.