Robert Kirby
LOOSE CANNON
It is not at all surprising that the African National Congress has decided to set up its own online news and information service, ANC Today. What is surprising is that it’s taken so long for the organisation to realise what benefits can accrue from a website totally under party control.
It might be simple desperation that’s made the ANC sit up, or perhaps they’re just following the lead of New Labour in England. Their website is also up and lying away and has already been dubbed pravda.com by cynical commentators. Why it became necessary is obvious to even the casual observer. Over there Tony Blair’s credibility has been decaying almost as quickly as President Thabo Mbeki’s. What’s more, Blair hasn’t had a runaway HIV/Aids pandemic and a dependable neighbourhood lunatic like Robert Mugabe to help him make major cock-ups.
The answer in both cases has been to set up a system whereby the ruling party’s intentions and explanations are always, as Blair’s press secretary, the formidably nasty Alistaire Campbell, would put it, “on message”. For the ANC heavies there will be no more having something like the party’s criminal extravagances in arms deals pounced on and savagely condemned by a covey of elitist and predictably racist white editors. Such filtering and analysis is for old-style democrats. With a website, a party can strike back quickly and with devastating effect. It can get the right information across to the voters in a state of pristine integrity, unadulterated, fresh from the pens of talented Mbeki pilot-fish like Tony Heard or Hony Teard as his loyal Cape Times subs used to call him.
An example of what might pre-sent itself on the ANC website was published “unedited” in last week’s Mail & Guardian: the hysterically hyperbolic Right to Reply by one of the presidential advisers, Jabulani Mzaliya. Such metaphoric overkill deserves wider coverage than it gets from being published in this modest organ.
Other uses of a website are numerous. Take the matter of the scheduling of party propaganda. This is a delicate and easily mishandled process. Only last Sunday there was a glaring instance of how wrong this scheduling can go. There was Mbeki, at long last admitting that it was high time he did something about constraining the slobbering basket case on the other side of the Limpopo. He wants to undertake a funny-farm invasion, as it were. “We are concerned about the situation in Zimbabwe,” intoned the president, looking very grave as he continued with other subtle paraphrasings of what the press has been trying to hammer into his head for months. “Some of the things that have been happening recently in Zimbabwe are of very serious concern. The things about the judges, the press and so on. We will be talking to them about these.”
It might only be that all Mbeki meant by this sudden volte face into practical regional politics, was that he’s looking for any excuse to go off to Harare and give Mugabe a flip in his brand new private airliner. Whatever the reason, scarcely had the confession staggered unwillingly across his lips than SABC TV’s weekly ANC-fest, NewsMaker, was interviewing live Zimbabwean Minister of Finance Simba Mokoni, who spent a good 20 minutes patiently explaining why any intervention in the Mugabe nightmare was completely unnecessary, and unwelcome to boot. That interview should have come two weeks earlier when Thabs was still playing stone-deaf to the warning bells. The ANC website could have kicked NewsMaker’s timing indiscretion into shape within half an hour.
As a quick repair mechanism the ANC news and information website would be invaluable. Every time someone like Jackie Selebi talks up a crock on television, the party hacks at their terminals can instantly contain the spread of yet another outbreak of foot-in-mouth disease. Blair’s site already has house-trained spinners on duty 24 hours a day.
Best of all will be the international benefits. Websites are perused and discussed all over the world. It’s instant in-your-face stuff. And with the website keeping him up-to-the-minute on how Essop Pahad is running the country, Mbeki could spend far more time on the international circuit. www.anc.org.za hasn’t come a second too soon.