My unbridled admiration for the Sunday Independent took a giant leap sideways last weekend. This was not only because I couldn’t find John Battersby’s byline anywhere in last Sunday’s edition. As regular readers will know, a Sunday Independent without Batty is like a toad without a sigmoidoscope.
What shocked me into realising that this high, specific-gravity 12-pager is actually capable of seeing its way through an edition sans a Battersby tract, was a column published on its leader page last Sunday. It had fallen from the hand of Mr Xolela Mangcu and took our own sedate weekly, the Mail & Guardian, to grievous task for having run a story about some lavish spending done by and on behalf of the newly appointed Unisa vice-chancellor, the Extremely Reverend Barney Pityana. In his spare time Barney’s an Anglican priest.
Appropriately, Xolela Mangcu started off in fine biblical rhetoric. “I love and admire Barney Pityana, just as I love and admire Njabulo Ndebele, and just as I loved and admired the late Sam Nolutshungo. Other than as my intellectual role models, these individuals have also been at the receiving end of what I once described as the journalistic McCarthyism of the Mail & Guardian.”
And what better proof of the M&G‘s fascist leanings than its front page story last week? Headlined “Hey, big spender” the story alleged that Barney Pityana has been living the life of Riley since he first seized the reins of Unisa six months ago. It seems the hard-won financial gains made at Unisa have virtually been wiped out in financing the new vice-chancellor’s personal and professional needs. The article described how Pityana has elected as his official residence a stately historical monument that Unisa had already sold for R6-million, which cost the university R1,7-million to cancel the sale, and which will need at least a couple of extra million to bring it up to Barney’s exacting domestic standards; how Barney spent R200 000 on his own inauguration ceremony; how Barney’s taking most of his recently expanded “management” gaggle on a luxury junket to Mauritius; how Barney and Unisa council chairperson, McCaps Motimele, flew first class to New York; how Barney’s run up a paltry million or two in sundry legal expenses; how he’s gone and had his office upgraded to the tune of another million and a half.
According to Xolela the “presumed media literati” at the M&G not only sucked the story out of one of their predictably racist thumbs, but the paper also deserves a lawsuit from Barney so that it learns the true meaning of legal costs. Presumably Xolela will be making similar recommendations about an article in the current edition of noseweek, which makes the M&G story about Barney Pityana’s profligacies read like a paean of praise. With his recommendation Xolela has broken new ground. It is almost unheard of for one newspaper to encourage civil action against another. But who cares about professional ethics when the Pityana halo is at stake?
In one of many resounding paragraphs Xolela states: “One wonders whether this smug sense of impugnity [sic] will prevail should the paper’s scurrilous attacks on Pityana’s integrity this weekend turn out to be false. They might be false for reasons that should be obvious to journalists — check your facts.”
I hate to jellify Xolela’s punchy logic, but it was for this very reason that the M&G journalist, David Macfarlane, sent 25 questions to Barney Pityana in the week he was working on the article, asking him to respond to the allegations later to be published in what Xolela was to describe as the M&G‘s “charge sheet”. Barney Pityana chose not to reply and thereby abrogated any right to complain that he wasn’t given an opportunity to respond. Don’t they teach their journos anything at the Indie?
Xolele Mangcu’s column listed how inaccurate he thought other aspects of the M&G story had been. According to him, Barney only had a humble economy class ticket as far as London, but which Unisa thoughtfully upgraded to business class so that Barney’s integrity could have more legroom. The London to New York sector was paid for by the Global Reporting Initiative.
Now, just because Xolela’s name begins with an X doesn’t for a moment mean he’s an unknown quantity. It might surprise Indie readers to learn that only a week before Xolela Mangcu launched his own onslaught on the “scurrilous licentiousness” of the M&G, he was on the phone to the very same M&G asking for a job as a columnist. Asked about his reasons for wanting to abandon the Sunday Independent and come over to join what he’d previously denounced as a bed of McCarthyism, Xolela said he “had problems” with some of the people at the Indie.
Not surprising, as it would seem to depend on which side of his face Xolela has been showing his Indie colleagues. Could this technique be something he picked up from one of his intellectual role models?
Archive: Previous columns by Robert Kirby