Robert Kirby
CHANNELVISION
Sorry to come back so soon to the BBC’s Hardtalk and Mr Tim Sebastian. It’s just that last Tuesday he interviewed the South African Minister of Defence, Mosiuoa Lekota, and what a revelation it turned out to be. About five minutes in, Sebastian lost all control of his own programme and never got it back. Now and then he apologetically murmured a few pale questions, but otherwise was as callow as a whipped mongrel.
Perhaps Sebastian purposely played the interview this way, realising that no amount of probing would reveal as much about Minister Lekota as Minister Lekota himself was revealing. Taken as a whole, the programme was a virtuoso celebration of Lekota’s abilities as a blowhard.
Can you sink much lower in political taste than to justify the current spate of farm killings in South Africa on the ground of score-levelling, the playing out of some sort of homicidal draw? According to Lekota far more rural black people were brutally slaughtered during the apartheid years than the white people now being brutally murdered. Hence farm murders may be presumed as being a class retaliation for remembered iniquities at best a desperate response to residual apartheid atrocities: the rainbow’s revenge. Cognitive obscenity of such cast is down there with that of Adriaan Vlok and Magnus Malan.
The interview was a caricature straight out of some pessimistic satire. Apparently this grade of bluster is what the Mbeki presidency wishes to project to the international community. These days it is all but impossible to turn on the television news without being confronted by a depressing repertoire: unctuous Essop Pahads, swaggering Madunas, Yengenis, Tshwetes, pretentious Abdullah Omars and Smuts Ngonyamas.
And now, on a global soapbox, we have Mosiuoa Lekota in truculent rebuke of the British media, dishing out brain-frying distortions of fact. It was the patronising smile that rounded off this splendid impersonation of Idi Amin in his strutted heyday. Watching the Lekota interview was a time for terrible despair. The basest of all corruptions are those of the mind. Arms deals follow shortly after.
Later the same evening Special Assignment came up with a documentary which, by any standards, was of top order. In her programme entitled Greener Pastures, producer and reporter Mpho Moagi looked at the increasing and alarming exodus from this country of highly trained and experienced nurses. These professionals are regarded and rewarded as premium material in countries like the United Kingdom. Over there a qualified sister is paid even allowing for rand/sterling adjustments five times what she gets here. In the programme was an emigrating sister with very specialised skills and 25 years of experience. On her South African salary she still could not afford a car, never mind her own home.
The documentary was the more effective in that it delivered its facts in sober understatement. A sister working in a rural clinic makes night calls, sees patients at her tiny, low-cost home, all for no extra reward. To summon an ambulance for a frail patient she is expected by her department to walk 2km to the nearest public telephone. To facilitate this means of communication the Department of Health gave her a R300 phone card, long since run out. She now has to pay for the calls herself. How many free cellphones, one wonders, adorn the vanities of Department of Health bureaucrats in Pretoria?
That sister is emigrating, to a top job in a UK hospital, as is a steadily increasing percentage of her colleagues. The very least Mr Mbeki could do is let a few of them hitch rides in his new R300-million luxury jet.
The first public sight of Mr Andre Viljoen, newly appponted CEO of South African Airways (SAA), was not at all encouraging. Whatever Mr Viljoen’s executive abilities, he comes across on television with all the style and charisma of a cornered paedophile: all hand-wringing and head-nodding, full-frontal smarmy.
According to Viljoen all that’s necessary to set SAA back on course is something called “true passion”. Contrary to his televisual mien, Viljoen’s going to be truly passionate and he feels sure everyone else in the airline will follow suit. It’s a quaint corporate strategy, so we will have to wait and see.
But also according to Viljoen, about the only thing wrong with SAA is that its aircraft haven’t yet got any fold-flat seats. Perhaps what he means is that it’s soon going to be possible to be truly passionate on SAA as well as for it.