Robert Kirby
CHANNELVISION
Blessed are the meek and mild for they shall inherit the presidential television interview. Thabo Mbeki must have been well pleased e.tv sent along a pair of such vapid bojos with a set of such predictable questions. San Reddy and Debora Patta were a sort of clown duo doing a routine as “no nonsense” interrogators, their essential smarminess leaking through every crack. A perfect occasion for the disporting of some virtuoso Mbeki-style flim-flam-flooey. As the song from Chicago goes: “Give ’em the old razzle-dazzle, bead and flummox ’em/How can they see with stardust in their eyes?”
The technique if technique isn’t too spacious a term behind the Patta/Reddy interviewing was plain to see. By asking what sound like difficult questions the impression is given that the questioners are serious about what they’re doing. But they never take anything further. They ask a penetrating question, receive an assiduously fatuous answer and then, as Reddy would say, change focus.
On more than several occasions Mbeki was asked questions in response to which he obfuscated, strayed off the point, blathered on or just plain avoided answering. For nearly all the time Patta and Reddy failed to follow through on their questions. They let Mbeki get away with as much as he wanted to get away with, to include some truly preposterous statements and misdirection. To be fair, Patta did push a bit when asking about the Zimbabwe debacle but avoided asking the obvious question: if Mr Mbeki is so adamant about not interfering in the domestic affairs of neighbouring countries, how does he justify the armed invasion by his government of Lesotho? Keep it up your sleeve for next time, Debora. After a couple of years of horrendous publicity about the South African presidency it is quite plain to see that Mbeki has decided to play ardent swain to the media, to get into the political spin game with a vengeance. If you can’t beat ’em, fondle ’em; in the light of which it is a bit odd Mbeki chose to prattle on like a back-fence gossip about how the South African media need to be more professional. Mind you, with Tony Heard as his closest-to-hand example of a big-time South African hack, I’m not surprised he’s a bit dubious about the profession as a whole. Most diverting was to watch the president fulminating away about the reported anti-Mbeki lobby in his ranks coincidentally Shades Tshwete had just named some of them on SABC television. These pretenders to his throne should be courageous and honest enough to come out into the open, said Mbeki, his face wreathed in distress at the thought of some mambas in his grass black ones to boot and therefore cancelling out any possible cries of racism as being the guiding impulse.
It was all very wry coming from someone whose whole style of administration is deeply conspiratorial. I also wondered why neither Reddy nor Patta thought to ask Mbeki to speculate on African coups d’tat in general. Should this pale attempt at one be seen as the first of many that will bloom under the rainbow?
If anything at all came out of this interview it was that the South African state president is very bad at communicating and very good at relentless sophomoric windiness. He’s also more than a little out of touch he didn’t know about the upcoming job summit. Everything Mbeki says is cloaked in a sort of waxen conditionality. He’s always “looking at the needs” or “seeking possibilities” or his election favourite, “accelerating the process of change”, like one of those asinine characters in reformation comedies Lord Fizzalot?
There were a couple of real treasures. Asked whether he would set an example by undergoing an Aids test, the president’s reply was, “No, it would be setting an example within the context of a particular paradigm” and here we all were thinking it was just a case of letting some admittedly Westernised expert have a close peep at a few drops of your blood. Later the pres came out with,”In the process of accelerating the process of change …” By any measure the above are state-of-the-art gobbledegook. Not so for Patta and Reddy who drank it all in with little murmurs of approval. That song from Chicago could finish: They’ll think you’re wise and democratic/Long as your lies are all emphatic/Razzle-dazzle ’em and they’ll never get wise.