Robert Kirby
CHANNELVISION
This was Idi Amin with bells and whistles. Debora Patta’s Third Degree interview with Lieutenant General Andrew Masondo must go down both as a classic and a benchmark. This was hardball television interviewing the way it should be: uncompromising, to the point, gratifyingly obdurate.
In about 15 bizarre and often hilarious minutes the lieutenant general was revealed to be a pompous blowhard, a figure of absurdist burlesque dimensions. If you put Masondo in a revue you’d be hissed off the stage for satirical overstatement. Not even in the most extravagant parody could his blend of bluster and arrogance be credible. He was a nightmare, a gruesome mutant of the likes of Idi Amin:bombastic, portentous, grandiose, a thing from the bureaucratic swamps.
Patta was asking Masondo about the mysterious disappearance of R300-million, funding from the Department of Defence for the Service Corps, of which Masondo is the chief. A special defence portfolio committee is currently also asking questions of the good lieutenant general. Of the R300-million only a few million can be accounted for; the rest has either been misappropriated what a gentle term that is for good old “stolen” or has vanished in what the committee has called “mismanagement of nearly criminal proportions”.
The latter opinion hardly needs proof. Masondo is in charge of the Centre for Advanced Training, which cost R300-million in donated funds to build and equip. It was intended to assist the reintegration into civilian life of Umkhonto weSizwe veterans. But, since 1996, this centre has managed to train only just more than a thousand of them. It was meant to train that number every year. Today the centre stands idle, its staff and maintenance costing R800 000 a month. Visual material showed tutors and trainers sitting in empty halls, in deserted classrooms. The centre contains brand-new equipment, machines and tools, and vacant mechanical workshops. Everything gleaming and new, ready to go.
A group of penniless ex-MK soldiers sits around a fire somewhere in Atteridgeville. They speak of their “betrayal” by the Service Corps, the fact that dozens of desperate phone calls made to the lieutenant general and his staff have yielded nothing but indifference. Asked about this, Masondo snorts and bellows: “You bring me the people. I will train them.”
Debora Patta must take full credit for her persistence. She had Masondo critically off balance from the first question and then went on to demonstrate that there is really only one way to grill his brand of bully: frontal attack that didn’t let him get away with a thing. How different from the bootlicking of the average SABC approach. My only regret was that, when given the opportunity, Patta didn’t draw a similarly taut line with Mr Mbeki a month or so ago.
The channel should recognise it as its grave national responsibility to promote and rebroadcast this interview as an encapsulation of all that is wrong with an administration that seems to believe itself immune to generally accepted codes of political and bureaucratic probity. That this latest fiasco takes place under the aegis of a defence ministry currently trying to justify the obscene extravagance of the R40-billion arms deal, makes it even more ominous.
Lindy Wilson’s documentary, The Guguletu Seven, was an exercise in extremely effective understatement. The story of how in 1986 seven young men were callously slaughtered by the security police was so terrible it would have been spoiled by the use of dramatic effect. Wilson obviously realised that it wanted for no embellishment; in putting together the documentary she forswore the usual devices of moody music and visual trickery.
The result was compelling, its structure nearly two hours of a sustained, almost cordial, unfolding of the story. It was an award winner. Take note please, Special Assignment, the director of which last week garnished a very important story with cheaply sentimental music. The programme was on the plight of old-age pensioners left to starve while officialdom blusters. What relevance mawkish Richard Clayderman-type piano music has to these old folk is hard to make out.
How lucky we are to have SABC sending its specialised news reporter, Miranda Strydom, to be on the spot where’er our state president comes and goes. As in Cuba and other places, constant Miranda was again there in London with her affectionate descriptions of Mr Mbeki swanning around in royal coaches, going down to the Houses of Parliament, thrusting his democratic message home.
Good stuff, Miranda.