It has been a bad couple of years for Spin Doctors. As a political species they are on the endangered list, cut down to size pretty much everywhere you look around the world. Caught up in their own hubris perhaps, they have often been architects of their own misfortune — the demise of Tony Blair’s right-hand communicator, Alastair Campbell, being the prime example.
In South Africa, thankfully, they soldier on. There is the charm and expertise of Bheki Khumalo in the Presidency. It was, after all, his boss and not him, who told The Washington Post that he knew no one who had died of Aids. Given what he has to work with, Khumalo does a terrific job. And I mean no disrespect to the president with this statement. It is just that Thabo Mbeki apparently continues to hold the notion of a soundbite in absolute contempt, preferring to express himself in more elliptical, nuanced and sometimes downright obscure terms. Good for the world of the academy perhaps, but not so helpful for the world of modern politics. And a complete nightmare for the spin doctor.
There is also the dedicated professionalism of Bulelani Ngcuka’s spokesperson Sipho Ngwema — perhaps the most often quoted spin doctor in South Africa, especially in recent times. The talented and equally loyal Ryan Coetzee is now back from a short-lived stay in Manhattan to be by the side of Tony Leon as a crucial election campaign unfolds.
For the South African Communist Party Mazibuko K Jara skillfully walks the tightrope, with statements that offer a distinctively independent yet measured tone.
In Luthuli House Smuts Ngonyama may be more prone to linguistic excess and political hyperbole, but he at least offers robust contributions to the debate. He certainly gets the African National Congress’s position across.
Which is my main point. Democracy needs spin doctors to put the positions of their principals and to oil the wheels of political discourse; silenced, the world of politics would be less textured and certainly duller.
As the great British liberal-left commentator Hugo Young argued in his very last column for The Guardian before his death a few weeks ago: ‘In the struggle to capture the public mind, spinning is the most elementary weapon. Why do people, especially in the pious media, shout that it has got to stop?”
As Young reminded us, Enoch Powell once said that for politicians to complain about the press was ‘like a ship’s captain complaining about the sea”. And, by the same token, for the media to complain about spin doctors is, as Young put it, ‘like railing against the entire ocean of governmental power and necessity”.
In South Africa, generally, the government has been inept at communicating its position and its successes since 1994 — with honourable exceptions. As a result it often appears on the defensive, responding to criticism or crisis, rather than proactively asserting its agenda.
The need to mark the 10-year anniversary of democracy has apparently stimulated a more decisive strategy. The government has published, well ahead of time, a review of its own performance, entitled Towards Ten Years of Freedom — Progress in the First Decade — Challenges of the Second Decade.
Although few, if any, of us have had a chance to digest the full report, it is clear that already the document has provoked some serious discussion among people both within and without the government and the ANC. On unemployment, for example, the report’s assertion that population growth is to blame for rising unemployment, and not the economy itself or the government’s management of it, has attracted a thoughtful response from Congress of South African Trade Unions’s economist Neva Makgetla in Business Day. In reply, government economist Allan Hirsh responds on the letters page. In turn, ANC MP Ben Turok plans an article in his magazine New Agenda.
The ANC is also in on the act with its own 10-year review mini-series on its website. More of a ‘soundbite review” compared with the Government Communication and Information System’s more weighty tome, it coheres rather neatly with the government offering. As indeed it should. What is the point of being the party of government if you cannot coordinate this sort of thing? — though, there are some who would rightly say that it is important to ensure that the natural and unavoidable advantages of incumbency are not permitted to run to excess.
The ANC contribution invites us to accept that inequality has been reduced through social expenditure. Of course, more poor people receive social grants than in 1994, yet this assertion contradicts what Sampie Terreblanche and others have empirically shown about the gap between the rich and poor growing over the decade. Clearly, this issue deserves further careful scrutiny.
And so it goes on. It would be nice to think that this sort of debate will frame a more illuminating and erudite consideration of public policy in the election campaign, in other words, that the election will serve to shed light as well as heat over the political terrain. But I am a chronic optimist. Over, then, to the spin doctors and election strategists. As I say, you can’t live with them and you can’t live without them.
n My column a fortnight ago, ‘A licence to loot”, attracted a large volume of positive correspondence and so deserves a short follow-up. Last week the Centre for Public Integrity in Washington DC published a report, The Windfalls of War, which records how more than 70 American companies and individuals have won up to $8-billion in contracts in post-war Iraq and Afghanistan over the past two years. Nearly 60% of the companies had employees or board members who either served in or had close ties to the executive branch for Republican and Democratic administrations, or members of Congress of both parties, or at the highest levels of the military.
The 62 000-word investigative report states that the companies that have benefited contributed more money to the presidential campaign of George W Bush — $500 000 — than to any other politician over the past dozen years.
Kellogg, Brown & Root, the subsidiary of Halliburton — which United States Vice-President Dick Cheney led prior to being chosen as Bush’s running mate — was the top recipient of federal contracts for the two countries, with more than $2,3-billion awarded to the company.
Said the centre’s executive director Charles Lewis: ‘Frankly, what surprised us most was the Keystone Cops, rank amateur nature of the government contracting process — This is all outrageous. We are talking about the expenditure of billions of dollars in taxpayer money.
‘As Americans, we have a right to know how our hard-earned money is spent. When American soldiers are at risk or worse, are being killed, the stunning incompetence and deliberate stone-walling become even more offensive and unacceptable.”