Glenda Daniels
crossfire
Incontestably the African National Congress is the best party to rule. But last weekend’s advertisement in a Sunday newspaper highlights a potentially catastrophic weakness in the party and among its allies a propensity for dredging up phantom enemies.
The full-page advertisement says the media is a platform for rightwing forces consisting, we are told, of “white so-called liberal politicians … so called independent or research organisations run by whites and a few members of the white business community”. In short, the media is accused of responsibility for all the problems in the country.
“There is a very perceptible and increasingly strident campaign against black people in powerful positions whether in government, business or the labour movement. There are constant efforts in the media to portray the country and its leaders in the most negative manner possible,” the advertisement says.
Paid for by 11 black business people, it makes some accurate comments. For instance: “By December 2000, over one million houses were constructed, and 1,3-million housing subsidies were allocated; some 400 000 homes were electrified, and over 120 clinics built in the same year. In the financial year 1999 to 2000, 412 000 new telephones lines were installed … and the consumer inflation rate is 7,8% compared to 15,3% in 1991.”
Nobody, and certainly not the media, wants to ignore these achievements of President Thabo Mbeki’s government. But the advertisement is scary in the way it lumps rightwingers and the media together.
It is hardly conceivable that if the British press were to criticise Prime Minister Tony Blair, they would then be accused of being right-wingers, racist or undemocratic.
The question has to be asked: Who is benefiting from the status quo? A small section of the black middle class, like the 11 people who paid for the advertisement not white editors, or black ones, for that matter.
However many obfuscating strategies, such as this advert, powerful people dream up, it remains a fact that political security and an open democracy can only come about through improving the lives of ordinary people, creating employment and raising the standards of living.
If middle-class prosperity is promoted at the expense of ordinary people there will be a severe price to pay and focusing vitriol on the media is unhelpful. If the powers that be continue to surround themselves with sycophants and people who owe their positions to patronage, the government’s and the ANC’s credibility problems can only escalate.
If the controversial arms deal, the failed soft-diplomacy approach on Zimbabwe, the HIV/Aids farce and the recent phantom “plot” are to be blamed on the media, how does the ANC, the government and now a small group of black business people explain general secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions Zwelinzima Vavi making the same criticisms and calling for a more open democracy; or Pan Africanist Congress MP Patricia de Lille voicing the same concerns? Are they to be labelled white and right-wing? Their huge working-class constituencies would be surprised to hear this.
There is no threat from the media. But the ANC experiences criticisms of the ruling party and the government as a real threat to the national democratic revolution. In a remarkably paranoid document, The Balance of Forces in 2001: A Discussion Document of the ANC National Executive Committee, the media are named as the enemy at least nine times.
The document talks of powerful forces that put the democratic movement on the defensive: “They put high on their agenda their own interpretation of nation-building and reconciliation as well as the interpretation of the country’s priorities on such issues as crime. This approach fed most of the media’s discourse, in tacit support of the agenda of white-based opposition parties.”
It also says: “The majority of media establishments are owned, or controlled in terms of content, by forces whose agenda is to weaken the ANC and precipitate its long-term defeat, or to shape an ANC that satisfies their interests.” And even problems in the tripartite alliance are blamed on the media.
Sadly, there’s more of this, but one argument in the document one cannot help agreeing with concerns an all-pervasive intellectual poverty in the country. Unfortunately the ANC seems to think that there’s intellectual poverty in the media only, but does not examine itself in this respect.
My view is that the dominant political culture in South Africa is bereft of intellectual verve. Creative ideas and innovative thinking are in short supply. Snatches of poetry and literary allusions don’t amount to intellectual thinking.
It is ironic that while the president himself is widely regarded as an intellectual, statements issued by the presidency are often so unintellectual as to be anti-intellectual.
The Aids debacle has been the worst instance of this, but there are many others. Intellectuals are often left gasping. We have little sense that in the presidency there is any real belief that the exchange of good ideas is central to our progress as a nation. The emphasis is on the control of ideas rather than on trade in them.
So let’s unite for democracy and make non-racialism a principle of our everyday lives, and even more importantly let’s focus on the real issues. An unemployed man who lives in a shack in Alexandra township is not blaming the media for his situation. Rather he’s wondering when delivery is going to take place. He wants a job and a house. A rural woman in the Eastern Cape wants to feed her family and send her children to school.
Let’s all work together to make democracy work, forget the ridiculous divisions, forget about the media being the enemy and concentrate on delivery the true spirit of the Freedom Charter of the old days, and the Constitution of today.