Moeletsi Mbeki has a strong background in journalism, with a resume that includes a Nieman Fellowship and time at the BBC. He was a media consultant for the ANC in the ’90s, and is currently the chairman of Endemol South Africa. Kevin Bloom gets the views of the president’s brother on the politics and economics of local media.
Given your background as journalist, do you agree with the common assertion out of government that there’s been a juniorisation of South Africa’s newsrooms and, as a result, irresponsible coverage of key national issues?
I don’t agree with that assertion, and it’s not necessarily the government’s alone. I don’t agree that there’s been a juniorisation of newsrooms. You can’t get more senior than the likes of Jonathan Katzenellenbogen, Tim Modise and John Perlman. Of course, in its aspect as a new economy, you do get a lot of mobility in South Africa. We’ve just seen the president’s spokesperson Bheki Khumalo leaving for the private sector, and he did a good job.
I think the difficulty we have in the media is still the breadth of opinion. Our media tends to operate in a fairly narrow ideological range. A lot of this has to do with the country being new, people cluster around the ANC. It’s not the fault of the media as such that people need to be around the liberator’s ideology.
But we are seeing a lot of debate within the ruling party about the way forward. We saw that at the national general council recently. Hopefully these debates will be reflected over time in the media.
Do you think there’s a problem with the current ownership structure in South African media? Coupled to that, is the sector sufficiently empowered?
There is a problem with the near-monopoly in TV broadcasting and daily newspapers. We have the worst of both possible worlds in terms of the funding of the state broadcaster. On the private side, the established capitalists see media as being monopolised by the existing players. They don’t see entry into media as being an opportunity.
But then you don’t yet have a new class of politically interested capitalists in this country. The BEE [Black Economic Empowerment] players have a lot of debt, but they don’t have the capital of a Ugandan or an Egyptian. Our BEE tycoons are not in that league, although they like to think they are.
What do you make of the view out of the GCIS [Government Communication and Information System] that a developing country like South Africa needs a form of “development communication” as opposed to rigorous watchdog journalism?
Firstly, there’s developing and there’s developing. There isn’t one type. Next to Tanzania, South Africa is a developed country. We have around 75 percent TV penetration and near 100 percent on the radio side. So you can’t compare us to a Tanzania. Secondly, South Africa has a huge number of popular organised institutions that range from trade unions, to chambers of commerce to NGOs. The way South Africans receive information is very different [to other developing countries]. People here are not purely dependent on the mass media for information. Thirdly, being a middle-income country, South Africa has a big consumer culture. So in their media people also want more choice.
One of the points that get forgotten is that government has withdrawn from development and gone the way of the Washington Consensus. The president said recently that the biggest culprit in non-investment has been government itself. There are lots of clichés we have which come from the liberation struggle and this development media thing is one of them.