The documentary on South African President Thabo Mbeki, recently rejected by the state broadcaster, the South Africa Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), sounds like ”something of a left-wing hatchet job”, official opposition communications spokesperson Dene Smuts said on Friday.
Smuts was reacting on Friday to SABC group chief executive Dali Mpofu’s complaint — at a Johannesburg Press Club function — that print media hostility may be the result of a number of satirical and negative responses to the canning of the Mbeki documentary, which assumed that it had been banned for political reasons.
Smuts said such an assumption was less than fair ”but perhaps not surprising given the [news chief Snuki] Zikalala-orchestrated soap opera SABC news has become”.
She said: ”In fact, the Mbeki documentary sounded something of a left-wing hatchet job to me, with its juxtaposition of President Mbeki and [assassinated South African Communist Party leader] Chris Hani as leaders, and its editorially unbalanced treatment of the old conspiracy theory about the assassination.”
Smuts suggested that the Young Communist League’s attempt this past week to get the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) to reopen the case on the 1993 assassination — ”declined by the NPA because no new evidence was offered” — sounded like part of the same initiative.
”The fact that the producers twice failed to effect changes requested by the SABC to achieve balance contributes to the impression,” she said.
”But while canning in other circumstances would be justifiable, it remains my view that the SABC should sit down with the producers to achieve a screenable product because this episode has been coloured by two problematic SABC positions,” said Smuts.
The first was the fact that Mpofu called critics of the canning ”right wing” — in which he included liberals — when it was arguably a left-wing hatchet job. The second was board member Thami Mazwai’s ”undemocratic view” that the president should be treated deferentially because in developing nations the office and the person could not be separated. — I-Net Bridge