In all the fuss that has been made about South Africa’s decade of freedom, one little detail seems to have escaped the attention of our compliant media. Capitalism for the masses — that goal of reformers from Boris Yeltsin to Tito Mboweni — has spread shareholdings but not institutional power. The economy is almost as concentrated as ever in a few, rich, remote hands.
Rising anger at the enrichment of the black few in the name of black empowerment shows that the previously disadvantaged have become the presently pissed-off. They are fast becoming the future fear factor for a government now presiding over boom times but looking uncomfortably over its shoulder at the rallying forces of populism.
There is one branch of the media, though — business broadcasting — honking the foghorn in the murky atmosphere. Drive-time radio and all-day business TV don’t exactly rock the boat of capitalism, but they are turning out to be champions of middle-class claims to a stake in business wealth. Ten years ago, business broadcasting was a pretty dreary affair, confined to the business slot at the end of the news.
Now the health of the rand and the gloss on gold are sexy subjects. Business gets hour-long drive-time programmes on several radio stations, and there is even Summit (Channel 55 on DStv), with dedicated morning and evening television coverage of the economy, company reports, entrepreneurship and markets. What’s happened is that everyone in the middle class wants to be a millionaire, and the media are only too eager to feed the dream.
Biz-on-Air does not represent the masses, but broadcasters have taken seriously the injunction of Mervyn King, author of the King Reports I & II for the JSE Securities Exchange, that business should attend to the interests of its stakeholders — employees, customers, suppliers, communities, and of course shareholders – in order to display good corporate citizenship.
There is a strange paradox in the appeal of business broadcasting to the growing numbers of listeners and viewers. Relatively few South Africans own shares, and because the vast majority of certificates are in institutional hands, the JSE has had a relatively low tradeability of shares in global terms. Ten years of democracy may have given us freedom, but it has not liberated the bulk of stocks and bonds from the clutches of major investors.
So how come everyone is tuning in to business? Do we really aim to play the markets? Or are we just drawn to talk of money? Fear and greed continue to rule the share buyer, but the emotions that drive the ordinary listener have little to do with direct personal gain. Just keeping abreast of what is going on in the economy seems to be a major motive, and the better it gets, the more we like the broadcasts. Biz-on-Air pumps us up.
Maybe South Africans have been spared what happened to Russians, who learnt that People’s Capitalism meant mafia capitalism. Ours is a genteel mafia, not given to knee-capping but, as a committee of the bourgeoisie, inevitably given to conspiracies. This is not Marx’s view, by the way, but Adam Smith’s, the saint of the free market, who was not one to consecrate the concentration of wealth in a few pockets.
Neither would the Governor of the SA Reserve Bank Tito Mboweni. He told a gala banquet of the Independent News & Media International Advisory Board, in Cape Town in 2002, that South Africa’s challenge “has been to ensure that the marginalised parts of the community are included in the process of growth and development”. In the same speech he conceded that non-residents of the country now commanded about a third of the turnover on the JSE.
Put that together with King’s remark concerning stakeholders — “the majority of whom are institutional investors” — and you have a picture of a developing South African economy in hidden hands. In spite of the devolution of shares via Old Mutual, Sanlam and Telkom in recent years, ownership and especially management control remain very narrowly based.
An educated guess is that the bulk of middle-class motorists attending to drive-time radio do have irons in the financial fire, but mainly in pension funds, unit trusts, and other forms of institutional savings and relatively low-risk investments. They listen out of curiosity and concern, rather than to grab diamonds or dump dogs on the markets tomorrow.
Even those who are traders are generally little guys by institutional standards. If you’re big you get your news sooner than the average Audience Joe. Still, the Joes are not insignificant: many are in business themselves and need to know what is going on out there that may affect their enterprises.
Business broadcasting offers a quick environmental scan alerting managers to the flux of the economy: how competitors are doing, problems facing suppliers, signals of regulatory changes, flashing lights on customer surveys. All this appears in more analytic form in the financial press, but broadcasting has the singular advantage of being immediate and easy to absorb.
So we have at least three levels of interest — best described as Investor Friendly, Bizotainment and Econolert, for the buyer, the idle listener and the engaged manager respectively — winging through the airwaves to our eager ears and eyes.
Business radio combines the intimacy of a personal medium with huge audience reach to make an immediate impact on public opinion. Television is far more laid back. Summit does all the same stuff as Michael Coulson (on SAfm Market Update), Lindsay Williams (on Classic Business Day), and Alec Hogg (on Moneyweb’s radio slots), but business TV is a rather staid animal that documents rather than dramatises, perhaps because most of the coverage is confined within the walls of the studio.
Radio has limitless horizons in the mind. It dramatises the issues in the persons of individual business figures. Company spokespeople have to answer off-the-cuff cheeky questions from the airtime tribunes of the people, with imponderable effects on investor confidence and share prices. There is little scripted in most of these interviews and the sparks fly when contending parties grab a moment at the mike to slag off the other guys.
Under Alec Hogg, Classic FM and Moneyweb ventilated the scandalous allegations brought against Corpcapital by its former non-executive director Nic Frangos. To cut a long story short, Frangos’s claims were described as “flimsy and speculative” by a Cape Town High Court judge — but meantime the intense coverage had drawn attention to issues of corporate governance that certainly rang bells in boardrooms across the country.
For the rest of us, it was bizotainment as usual. We may not get rich, but one twist of the knob and we get wised up quickly.