It was not at all surprising to see State President Thabo Mbeki using a biblical reference to get his message across about how the South African media continue to enjoy their racist sport. The ANC Today website regularly offers up parables from St Thabo. Last week he employed a desperately strained analogy to get his point across. In recalling Christ’s injunction to a couple of his disciples to become “fishers of men”, Mbeki said South Africa’s investigative journalists have become “fishers of corrupt men”.
I note that my esteemed colleague, Karen Bliksem of The Sunday Independent, speculates that the letter was not of Mbeki’s hand, but had been written by a ministerial crony. I disagree. The piece was an authentic Mbeki Triple-P: pretentious, pious and prosaic with a touch of intellectual flatulence to round it off. Of course he wrote it himself.
Thabo said that journalists, who trawl the rich shoals of the corruption, fraud, falsehood, deceit, perjury, subterfuge, misappropriation, deception, mendacity, hypocrisy, connivance, thievery, extortion and shop-embezzlement that constitute today’s African National Congress, are nothing but a bunch of unreconstructed racists intent on entrenching the scandalous myth that black people are incapable of honesty, decency or even washing their hands before voting for Tony Leon.
He may well be right, but it’s the “fishers” part of Thabo’s argument that fascinates. As a fisherman of some experience I must say that his choice of analogy came singing home to me. I had often thought along the same lines when picking up a news-paper to read about how some bigoted angler-hack from the Sunday Times had foul-hooked an Eastern Cape provincial bottom-feeder (Carpus corruptus) with a belly full of old-age pensioners’ money. I noted with amusement how, soon after the greedy fish was landed and was lying gasping for breath on page three, hasty instructions to revive him came from high government circles. This is known as the “catch-and-exonerate” ethic and is carried out in panicky mouth-to-gill resuscitation by the Government Communications and Information System.
In its mild-mannered way the Mail & Guardian also goes swindler-fishing now and then. One of the more popular methods used by this paper is so-called “live-baiting”. Reporter Sam Sole is skewered on to a triple hook, lowered into the depths of government reservoirs and told to swim temptingly around trying to look like part of the arms-deal food chain. Often sooner than later some insatiable ANC high-upper (Polygamous zuluensis) makes the terrible mistake of trying to eat Sam. At this stage the editor hoicks up his rod, the hidden triple-hook sinks in and next thing you know there are these panic-stricken Friday-shift SABC news editors rushing to get Polygamous back into the water before he expires.
By persuasion many journalists are not coarse fishers, preferring the subtle methods of fly-fishing and which don’t involve handling of all that smelly bait, the hauling around of vast nets, let alone spear-fishing. Cunning journos would rather be impostors, creeping silently along river banks and casting tiny look-alike feather concoctions on to the surface of the water in the hope that some otherwise impeccably honest political fish will be beguiled into believing these gaudy baubles are part of its rightful diet of perks-food.
One of the more successful nymph patterns used by journalist fly-fishers has, of course, been the now popular Yengeni’s Deceiver. Tied to a size three hook the fly’s corpulent thorax is dressed with a yellow silk fleece and has a hackle shaped to look like the well-known three-pointed Mercedes trademark. Using a whip-cast this fly is tossed gently into the head of a busy run where the bigger lunkers are lurking. Journos are often startled by the sheer ferocity of the take.
Other efficient fly-patterns are Boesak’s Twister, the Sarafina Killer, Lekota’s Phantom, Abraham’s Mayfly, Popo’s Fumbler and the ever popular Mrs Simpson-Madikizela-Mandela.
Not much is known about the catch-rates of long-line fishing for corrupt politicians and civil servants. This technique of baiting numerous hooks attached to long floating lines is eco-logically dodgy as many otherwise inedible species get caught. No honest South African journalist wants to unbalance his impeccably racist bag-limit with a selection of white foreign-exchange fraudsters, Chinese perlemoen smugglers, Lebanese slum landlords, Afrikaans brothel-keepers, Indian counterfeiters and Italian golf-course entrepreneurs and their New National Party enforcers. When it’s foul corruption and dishonesty, any self-respecting South African journalist concentrates on stereotyping only black people, preferably African black people.
What Mbeki doesn’t mention in his parable of the predictable reporters are the appalling social habits of those who write for newspapers, particularly the high rate of insobriety in the profession. Everyone knows journos are hopeless drunks and that what they write about is only as viewed through the bottom end of a bottle. I am surprised Mbeki didn’t take the opportunity to identify these “fishers of the corrupt” as members of the Media Pissedcatorial Society. He would have been spot on with that as well.
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