It is an amusing irony that New National Party leader Marthinus van Schalkwyk, so piously scandalised by the Democratic Alliance’s dalliance with Jurgen Harksen, should now find himself in a similar fix over a R300 000 donation to his party from alleged Mafia sources. The hard fact is that all the sleaze over party donations that has come to light in the past year involves present and former members of the NNP. The party is a crawling sink of apartheid-era rottenness that would do South Africa a great favour by simply disappearing.
There are two issues in the latest scandal. The first is the apparent connection between the donation by Italian count Riccardo Agusta and the approval granted for the development of the Roodefontein golf estate in an ecologically sensitive area of Plettenberg Bay. The public protector will have to decide whether the then-Western Cape premier, Peter Marais, and provincial environment MEC David Malatsi, both NNP men, solicited a bribe for the project go-ahead from Agusta, an associate of alleged Mafia boss Vito Palazzolo. It is possible, as Van Schalkwyk claims, that he knew nothing of the connection until last month, when he received an anonymous letter. If the public protector decides that there was a bribe and that Van Schalkwyk knew of it, or suspected it, he must follow his colleagues Marais and Malatsi on to the dungheap of history.
Leaving aside the question of a possible bribe, there is the further issue of whether Van Schalkwyk knew of the donation, and its dubious source, from the outset. To his evident embarrassment, Marais says he did. In a motion in the Western Cape legislature last July, the DA drew attention to the link between the Roodefontein project and Agusta/Palazzolo. It called for a judicial inquiry and for Malatsi to appear before the legislature’s environment committee. The Mail & Guardian publicised the connection between Agusta and Palazzolo in a detailed exposé in mid-2001. Van Schalkwyk is a known micro-manager, and the NNP is notoriously cash-strapped. The R300 000 must have been its biggest bonsella in years.
All this suggests the NNP leader was well aware his party took money from Agusta and who Agusta was. But because political parties in South Africa do not have to disclose the sources of their funding, he almost certainly winked at the Italian nobleman’s generosity.
Coming hard on the heels of the Harksen gemors, ‘Mafiagate†rams home the need for a law compelling parties to reveal their funders. It is the only way the public can discern a connection between funding and political decision-making, and is particularly important where parties are in government.
The parties, of course, want to be able to continue taking money from all-comers. They, and particularly the opposition parties, fear disclosure will scare off donors. But in the cause of clean and accountable government, funding transparency has become an unavoidable neccesity.
Media are not melanin-deficient
From time to time, some ruling party loudmouth will get up and accuse the media of being unrehabilitated relics of our apartheid past bent on derailing the transformation of society. Frothing at the mouth, they blame the media for all South Africa’s ills — short of El Niño and other unexplained phenomena such as the continued existence of Marthinus van Schalkwyk.
This week it was the turn of Deputy Minister of Trade and Industry Lindiwe Hendricks to sing this tired tune.
‘The press in South Africa is still in the hands of the white minority — When there’s a mistake they amplify it. They hardly ever focus on the good news,†Hendricks is reported to have told Saudi journalists.
Now, if Hendricks and her colleagues bothered to update themselves on contemporary South Africa, they would discover that a large portion of media assets is in black hands and the bulk of English language newspapers are headed by people with a reasonable amount of melanin in their system. The current ferment in the media industry, where black entrepreneurs are buying and launching new products, is further proof that transformation is not the mirage it is made out to be.
They would also discover that while South Africa does have critical media, the South African media institutions are broadly supportive of government policies and initiatives.
But journalists are themselves as guilty of hyperbole as the loudmouths. When politicians snipe at the media, the hysterical reaction from many journalists is that press freedom is under threat.
The fact is that while there may be some within the ranks of the ANC — and the opposition parties — who are uncomfortable with the level of media freedom in the country, press freedom is not under threat. South Africans trust their newspapers and it is the public that the enemies of press freedom, whoever they may be, will come up against.
Instead of politicians railing against an imaginary reactionary press and journalists fearing a non-existent threat, we should celebrate the fact that we live in a society where Essop Pahad and The Citizen can co-exist.