At a recent seminar on journalism in Africa, I was asked about the Mail & Guardian’s uncomfortable relationship with the office of Deputy President Thabo Mbeki. Was there something uniquely African about the apparent intolerance of criticism at the highest levels of our government?
Not at all, I shot back. The experience of our sister newspaper, The Guardian in London, shows that even in the oldest democracies people in power take a dim view of journalistic licence. Before Tony Blair’s Labour Party came to power, The Guardian was the darling of the party establishment. But since The Guardian has shown an undiminished passion for exposing corruption in government, Labour feels betrayed. Yet it is no more anti-Labour than we are anti-African National Congress.
So the often small-minded and petty behaviour of the deputy president’s office – which has put us behind the South China Morning Post in the queue for an interview -is not unique to this country or this continent.
There is hardly a government in the world, once it is ensconced in power, that is comfortable with the robust debate and public scrutiny that is part and parcel of democracy.
At a seminar hosted by the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs in Johannesburg last Saturday, a group of African politicians expressed deep scepticism about the press and its freedoms. They echoed the sentiments expressed last week by a senior ANC man, a former Robben Islander who has commercial interests in the media, who saw nothing wrong with direct control of the press by the government.
When I am asked if this is an African thing, I point with pride to the journalists of this continent, from Nigeria to Zambia, who have declared their independence from the politicians and from power. The concept of the African media as consisting of sycophants and government stooges is insulting and out of date. As talk-show host Phil Donahue once said: “If we ever needed a more aggressive, bawdy, nose-under-the-tent, not-respected press, it’s now.”
I decided to start this weekly column because I wanted to open a dialogue with the M&G’s readers, a need that was particularly acute last Friday when I opened the paper and discovered that, for most copies of the paper in Gauteng, the page two that we had changed for the second edition was missing.
This, for those of you who never did find it, was the first part of John Pilger’s analysis of the Kosovo crisis. Readers who were determined enough could find it on page 55, where it ousted an excellent spread on boxing.
We can only say sorry and that it was all due to a visit by a particularly mischievous gang of gremlins to the printers.
As for the piece: whether or not one agrees with John Pilger’s perspective – and our considered position is spelt out in our editorial – the sentiment behind commissioning such a piece was that making war should never be accompanied by a comfortable consensus. Its motivations must always be interrogated, whether the targets are in Serbia or Lesotho.
This is not only because “military intervention” to solve political solutions usually makes things worse, but because killing people should never be easy.