”President Mbeki explains to European leaders why Nepad is succeeding beyond all expectations.” ”The government reveals how the arms deal has brought billion of rands in foreign investment and created thousands of jobs.” ”[A] grateful Northern Cape community gets its first fresh water as [a] Minister turns on the taps.” ”Exciting new housing developments by the ANC in the Eastern Cape bring hope to many.”
Then comes the ”ag shame” touch, delivered with a helping of devastating SABC wordplay to get the nation hosing itself. ”Daffy’s ducking for his new-found friend who hasn’t got the right kind of feathers for a quick dip.” (Shot of duck in plastic swimming pool with Maltese poodle wearing water-wings.)
Does that menu smell familiar? Of course it does. Notwithstanding the corrected grammar, those are typical opening headlines to an SABC3 evening television news. They serve as grim affirmation that the SABC is now serenely confident that, after only 10 years of free-range democracy, its dumbing-down strategies have succeeded. It believes it has transposed its viewers into a bunch of seriously shit-for-brains dummies.
There’s no other earthly explanation for what the SABC smugly pass off as news. Their evening television bulletin should be renamed The Thabo Mbeki Half Hour, a grim variety of reality/survival television in which you are never allowed to be free of the president’s company. You are permanently locked in some space-time continuum with him and his sensational intellectual exploits. Whether he’s walking with dignified tread down yet another internationally significant red carpet, addressing some global conference on post-colonial economic strategies, smoothly terminating the latest West African war or simply scurrying up the passage to the gent’s bogger, SABC television news will be there with Miranda Strydom in close attendance.
Where ‘ere Thabo walks, there shall Miranda follow: the SABC’s pre-eminent field-disciple, instant interpreter of the presidential genius. One wonders whether they write her television material for her? Does the presidential team drag along its house-hack, Tony Heard, to make sure that Miranda leaves the appropriate libations. Or do she and Thabo write it all on their own?
SABC television news is as slavish as those fragments we’ve seen of the state-approved newscasts of communist Eastern Europe: the pitiful ”Comrade Diaries” of Moscow and its satellites and which migrated, like an infectious disease, to every sad autocracy of the Third World. Just to the north of us we’ve got a superb example of obedience-trained national television: ZBC.
The SABC didn’t put Snuki Zikalala in charge of SABC news because he’s such a hit with the jukskei set. He’s there because the SABC board and its Union Buildings masters felt they could rely on Snuki to confuse state broadcasting with public broadcasting — something he does with unbending efficiency.
What the SABC hopes to achieve with all this sedulous bum-creeping is obvious. Snuki and the board want to keep their jobs and perks intact. Less obvious is why the African Nationial Congress believes there is so much profit in creeping around its own fundament. Surely its Pahad intellectuals have taken note of only recent political history. Be it oligarchy or dictatorship, those governments that despise their people, govern them as if they’re mindless idiots, tend to shorten their own shelf lives. Be it Daniel arap Moi or Charles Taylor, arrogant one-party leadership eventually self-destructs. Just like the American aid dollars were, the jewels and ingots have to hastily be spirited away because suddenly there are rebels at the palace gates, peacekeeping forces in the garden and the gutters flow with blood. All that’s left in the way of remorse is safe haven on the French Riviera and a pious epitaph from Kofi Annan.
What Snuki and company are doing has a particularly hazardous side-effect: politicians who see themselves so publicly adored and admired tend, rather sooner than later, to become slaves to their own fictions. The more institutions like the SABC stroke, the more self-satisfied the fat cats purr. This is the most corrupt of all the tariffs of high office: that stage when self-doubt is superseded by unconditional self-esteem. With that comes a temporary feeling of immunity from the rage of people denied. But take one terrified glance around post-colonial Africa, or post-communist Eastern Europe, and you’ll see the innoculation never lasts for ever.
Mind you, by the time the ANC and its cronies have trousered what’s left of Telkom, Eskom or any other parastatals making a profit, they’ll have long since abandoned the likes of the SABC and other flatterers. No room on the fleeing chopper for those suckers.