Just for fun, I think I will write up a document titled Special Blue Hamster Consolidated Surveillance Report and fax it to media and trade unions.
It will say something along these lines: Gauteng’s monorail project is really a ploy by a syndicate of Malaysian bookmakers to fund the ANC leadership bid of one of the candidates, codenamed X. The bookies, it will say, are desperately trying to break into the lucrative South African match-fixing market before 2010 and believe the only way of doing so is to ensure that their candidate is elected ANC leader later this year.
The document, to be headed ”Top secret”, will be written in spook-talk and will be full of references to ”DSO informants” and ”NIA sources”.
I’m willing to bet that, within days, the report will be in the newspapers. There will be a furious denial from Minister of Intelligence Ronnie Kasrils and the Jacob Zuma camp will say they want the police to investigate the possibility that their man is X and that this is yet another state attempt to smear him. SACP general secretary Blade Nzimande will look grave and say he’s worried that state agencies are spying on him and other party members.
Once the document has gone out, I will sit back and watch the fallout.
Truly, these are crazy times. It seems the ANC succession battle is being fought through increasingly ludicrous leaks and journalists are allowing themselves to be used far too easily.
A few weeks ago the Mail & Guardian splashed the story of an assassination plot against Zuma on its front page. Soon after, City Press established that the ”assassin” was a beach vagrant and that the plot was a hoax. Police are investigating.
It seems the M&G had been neatly taken in.
Admittedly, it’s a tough call. When the camp of one of the country’s most important political figures lets it be known it has information of this kind, it’s hard to ignore. I’m told they produced an affidavit and it seemed they were taking it seriously.
To its credit, the M&G worked hard to put some distance between itself and the claims, with many ”allegedlys”. But still, there they were on the front page, with a graphic of Zuma in the crosshairs and that lent them a great deal of weight.
More recently, we had the Special Browse Mole Consolidated Report, which said Zuma was being bankrolled by Libya and Angola. This one broke elsewhere. Again the reports tried hard to present it with some scepticism. The document was ”bizarre” and ”possibly faked”, one report said.
But still the allegations were out there and people could make of them what they liked. Some will have taken them at face value, believing that they represented evidence that Zuma is being funded by foreign powers. His supporters were likely to see them as further evidence of a state plot against him. The result was sensation and confusion, where clarity was urgently needed.
The significance of documents such as ”mole” can be read in two quite different ways. Opponents of Zuma might well take them at face value and believe that he’s being funded by foreign powers. His supporters are likely to see them as further evidence of the misuse of state resources against him.
City Press last week presented a detailed analysis of the saga, written by its editor Mathatha Tsedu, who concluded that the document seemed to have been cobbled together by the Scorpions from reports by former apartheid spies. He further argued that it was being used by the Zuma camp to nurture the notion of his victimhood.
This is the kind of careful journalism the story needs. On the one hand, detailed investigation that seeks to establish the source and nature of the document as closely as possible. On the other, intelligent analysis that places the claims in their broader political context.
Last week’s M&G went some distance on this road, too. It reported the SACP’s fears of the misuse of state resources, and placed ”mole” in the context of a history of wild claims. An editorial also referred to the Zuma campaign of victimology and endorsed the SACP view that the ”planting of false stories spawned a climate for Chris Hani’s murder”.
If that is the case, then it becomes doubly important to be cautious. The plot tales doing the rounds can’t be ignored — they are part of the present political story. But it’s not enough to present them with scepticism. Readers need as much clarity as possible and that means investigating such claims for their factual basis and source and analysing them for their political meaning.
There’s little doubt that as the ANC’s leadership race heats up more of these stories will see the light of day — perhaps even the ”blue hamster”.
It’s too easy to fabricate this stuff. Let’s check more carefully.
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