What a wonderful breakfast I had last Sunday morning, served up courtesy of SABC group CE Dali Mpofu.
For those of you who missed it, Mpofu declared in the pages of City Press that the Mail & Guardian‘s decision to put the “commission of inquiry into blacklisting and related matters” report online was not in the public interest. (A judge agreed that it was in the public interest, but let us not quibble.)
It was, Mpofu said, “headline grabbing one-upmanship against other newspapers and the pervasive anti-establishment hatred of anything connected to the democratically elected, black-dominated government of the day, pandering to the basest instincts of the South African mainly racist political right-wing, as evidenced by its selective reporting when it had the full report”. Eina!
English evaded me as I was slam-dunked into my coffee. How to respond? There is nothing you can say when somebody calls you a racist — “some of my best friends are black” went out of fashion in 1994. When Mpofu implies that the M&G is a tool of the racist right, what am I supposed to say? “Some of our best readers are black”?
But this baiting game is nothing new. When someone resorts to name calling and tossing about nasty labels, it’s because they’ve run out of ideas and arguments. Alas, such ranting gets us no closer to understanding what makes the public broadcaster tick, and no closer to interrogating the commission’s findings.
Mpofu wrote that the M&G‘s decision to publish the report had frustrated the second stage of his plan: to study the findings, take disciplinary action and then release the report. Oddly enough, none of this plan was outlined in the nine-page summary that the SABC released on October 12, which only explained why the full report would not be released.
Our democracy (and the SABC’s code) is all about transparency. You can sit in at Parliament; attend the Constitutional Court; study what ministers are doing (or not) by keeping an eye on the government’s website. If you know how to read the budget, you can drill down into the finest detail of state expenditure (or under-expenditure).
The paradox of transparency is that you are not always going to like what you see.
Now we are seeing and hearing nothing from the SABC, and we have no idea what will come of the commission’s recommendations.
Mpofu’s first year in office presented the tantalising possibility of genuine public engagement with the SABC. Apparently, the dialogue went too far. Those of us who would like to see a far sharper, fearless news operation emerging at the SABC have been told to piss off.
In the fevered dreams of Dali Mpofu, the chorus of criticism of his conduct is about “wresting control of the SABC … from us barbarians”.
We barbarians at the gate don’t want control, only transparency and accountability.
Ferial Haffajee is editor of the M&G