Early this year the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) tried to lay charges of murder and culpable homicide against the Minister of Health Dr Mantho Tshabalala-Msimang and Trade and Industry Minister Alec Erwin, and claimed that protestors were assaulted on their way to laying these charges. The accusations and counter-accusations made great copy for newspapers starved of street demos since the Rainbow rose over the nation.
But the politicians were not amused. Militancy in any form is frowned upon in modern-day South Africa because the Struggle is over and the state has once again reserved to itself the right to do violence.
What does this tell us about the state we’re in? Specifically about what has been called ‘public reason”, or the right we all share to engage in a process of declaring differences and demanding attention to our views? This process doesn’t have to be polite, or conducted in quiet enclaves in which consensus is reached and everyone goes away happy. No, the essence of a true political quarrel is that it is impolite, messy, and may indeed involve head-banging in the streets – but it is governed by rules of engagement that say we all stand to gain by airing issues.
Not content with street demos, the TAC has threatened to take Aids corpses to Parliament. Good idea. The key to direct action by a pressure group is media coverage: it’s a combination key, actually, because the public issue, the vivid symbol, and hungry media come together at one time and place to splurge the news event. Today the TAC has assumed the mantle of Greenpeace in its heyday – and remember, successive French governments damned the Rainbow Warrior brigade as irresponsible hooligans or outright terrorists for interfering with nicely planned nuclear explosions. History judged otherwise.
The burning issue of our time and place is government’s horrific failure to address the HIV-Aids issue rapidly, effectively and with compassion for the victims. Its record in this area is so dismal it hardly bears talking about, but talk – and mobilisation – must occur because concerned citizens cannot allow the issue to drop out of sight. The embarrassment to a government that has prided itself on its human rights record has been extremely effective.
In just the same way, relations between the press and politicians need not be decorous. Recently the editor of Business Report, Alide Dasnois, criticised Reserve Bank governor Tito Mboweni for his arrogance and rudeness in dealing with journalists’ questions. This incident prompted a good deal of sympathy and banter on Internet chat groups, and it got me asking journalists their experiences of how senior officials and politicians treat them.
Most journalists didn’t want to be quoted in case they queered the pitch with their high-up sources. To seek a fresh view outside of journalistic circles I asked Chris Skinner, co-author of the bible of PR textbooks, The Handbook of Public Relations in South Africa, what he thought of the relationship between journalists and people in power.
‘They need one another to survive,” said Skinner. ‘But, personal and acrimonious attacks on individuals only weaken rather than strengthen the resolve of the electorate to participate in the election process.” The media, adds Skinner, need specialist reporters to interpret government to itself and the public, while government, for its part, should strengthen and supplement the media’s reporting through its own PR apparatus.
This view of things is both broader and narrower than the hallowed principle that media and government are bound to find themselves in an adversary relationship. Broader, because it is based on the idea that information should get into the public arena by extracting it from organs of the state honestly and conscientiously: specialism, in this context, means doing the job of information provider. Narrower, because it’s a neutral view of politics and tends to ignore the acrimony that erupts between press and state.
Cynics will say government puts its hand on its heart – and does the other thing. Spin is what most government communication is bound to contain because the dynamics of publicity can either boost or damage government programmes, and who wants damage?
Tsar Tito the Terrible does not seem to have done himself a great deal of damage by allegedly treating the press with contempt. His great advantage is that he can control the nation’s money supply (including his own large salary), so admire him or not he’s a man we all have to fear.
Fear is a great respector of persons. But beyond that, should he mend his manners? My investigation led to the conclusion that it hardly matters. Yes, the man bristles with ego and apparently resents the stupid questions that Dasnois and others must ask as part of their job. And yes, she was right to tackle him on the manner of his offhand rebukes – a little civility would not be out of place.
But there is a difference between a little civility and Big Civic Duty. The latter is a product of the interaction between media and politicians in their service of the public. Interaction, note, not intercourse. Familiarity breeds a contemptible consensus. There is nothing necessarily civil about civic duties although a little mutual respect goes a long way in oiling the wheels of communication.
The American liberal political philosopher John Rawls has argued that the processes of ‘public reason” do require a measure of civility between citizens in a democracy. The greater political good, however, is that even if people don’t like each other or don’t share each others’ fundamental values, the institutions of a constitutional state create space for discussion.
This does not mean consensus is reached over fundamentals – as a matter of fact, Rawls dismisses the possibility that people in a complex, multicultural and multi-religious society can agree over what he calls ‘comprehensive doctrines”. Muslims and Christians – indeed even different sects of Christianity – will not embrace each other’s faiths but they can still get along within the legal and practical arrangements of a state founded on the contract that we should all live together and seek justice.
South Africans are perhaps uniquely fortunate that their ‘social contract” was signed and sealed in full view of everyone at Kempton Park in 1993; an explicit social contract if ever there was one. It matters not that Alide criticises Tito and Tito brushes her off – it’s more to the point that both the criticism and the brush-off can occur. Compare that with the total destruction of institutional integrity in Zimbabwe where, first, criticism of the President was prohibited, and finally the independent press was simply shut down for bothering the state at all.
We don’t want a dictatorship of decorum, what we ask is the management of rage -and our institutions can ensure this if they are respected.
Yet, and here’s the rub, both racism and the mythology of the struggle threaten to undermine our best constitutional efforts to manage rage. A Parliamentary correspondent for one of the major newspaper groups told me that a ‘very real paranoia exists about the media” in government because media comment is ‘still dominated/fashioned/controlled by whites who had little or nothing to do with the ANC pre-1994 and still reflects white middle class, basically racist opinions and prejudices”.
The real danger here is that paranoia comes to replace principle. You can see it already in the way the ANC Youth League has lauded Deputy President Jacob Zuma, rejecting corruption charges levelled at him on grounds that he was a great soldier in the struggle. As the Parliamentary correspondent put it, ‘this opens up a lot of cans of worms and reinforces my incredible sense of déjà vu (in relation to what happened in Zim when I was there)”.
Another Rhodie moaning about Africa’s inability to adopt true democracy? There we go – typecasting is always easier than public reasoning.
The Kempton Park settlement means that we should ignore those who spied or tortured for the apartheid regime, or anyone who was a human rights abuser in the ANC camps, provided they came clean before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The social contract has put all that behind us. The important thing is not that players in the drama should like each other, but that they should execute their roles within the framework provided by the liberal democratic system that we have embraced as our own.
Litany of Spins
Journalists listed a litany of communication sins at the feet of senior government leaders. Here is a summary, expletives deleted:
Kader Asmal – Testy. The darling of the press during his tenure as Water Affairs Minister is now frustrated by the country’s fouled-up education system and he doesn’t like criticism.
Mangosuthu Buthelezi – Verbose. Less so in recent years, perhaps getting tired of writing yard-long Letters to the Editor, and perhaps too, burnishing his image as the ANC falters.
Penuell Maduna – Shoots off his mouth. Beneath the impulsive exterior, however, is a tactician with a sense of how to deal with – and even manipulate – the media.
Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri – Confused and confusing. If she knew what her telecommunications policy was, others would not be in a free-for-all fight to decide it, and the press might actually listen.
Alec Erwin – Deep in thought. His earnest manner and combative statements about rich nations have won him a following amongst journalists, but he’s not good at answering pointed questions.
Valli Moosa – Rattled. Tried to melt down the plastic bags industry and came off with some limiting compromises. Still, he retained his image as a cool guy with a pleasant openness.
- Mantho Tshabalala-Msimang – Mulish. Multiple calls for her resignation over the mishandling of HIV-Aids treatment have left her unmoved, though even she admits that her department has had a communication problem.
- President Thabo Mbeki – Remote. The man is an enigma wrapped up in the mysteries of Essop Pahad’s media defences of him – the latter being an intellectual Bouncer at the President’s Club, fond of hurling abuse at media.
- Stella Sigcau – Who? The invisible Minister of Public Works in case you didn’t know, is never likely to rise to the challenge of becoming Minister of Mass Employment (Keynes-style: let them dig holes, just give them an income)
- Jacob Zuma – Until recently, likeable; now cornered. (Still) popular with journalists for being approachable, (sadly) mixes up his own case with the case for democracy.