Jacob Zuma’s theme tune, the not very rousing “Bring me my machine-gun”, is certainly a questionable campaign jingle. But that bit of musical demagoguery has nothing on the latest edition of the South African Communist Party song book.
At the end of the SACP congress, newly elected chairperson Gwede Mantashe, waving his fingers in the air, sang heartily along with the song “Thabo Mbeki siyabuza ubani owabulala uChris Hani [Thabo Mbeki, tell us who killed Chris Hani]”.
South African politics, in a period of spy scandals and conspiracy claims, is a brutal game and there is a certain honesty in naming your enemy — something Zuma has never done.
But the slippery slope has become a precipice when political leaders encourage their supporters in suggesting that the president of the country was complicit in murder, without offering concrete evidence.
This is not a question of lèse majesté — it is perfectly appropriate for the SACP to criticise Mbeki directly and to ask him to explain how he treated Hani and the values he stood for during his own rise through the ranks of the ANC.
It is not a cause for surprise, or concern, that tough questions should be asked, given that an intensely contested succession process is under way. It is a time for tough questions.
But Mantashe began his tenure on quite the wrong note by endorsing an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory.
For some time now the Young Communist League has been asking for the re-opening of the inquest into Hani’s assassination. This is necessary, they have maintained, because the truth commission itself found that Janusz Walus and Clive Derby Lewis, who are serving life terms for the murder, did not tell the whole truth. There have been persistent whispers that they might be ready now to spill the beans. Let’s wait for that.
Calls for further investigation make sense, but to make them in the context of the campaign against Mbeki is to undermine the credibility of the outcome. And, in the absence of solid evidence, to float unverifiable claims that Mbeki was involved in the assassination of a comrade is the lowest and most dangerous kind of politics.
To be sure the SACP did not invent the rumour. It is hinted at in the unauthorised Mbeki documentary that the SABC has so far declined to screen — and has been doing the rounds in various forms for some years. Five months ahead of the ANC’s leadership election it is perhaps inevitable that it would start doing the rounds once again.
But it should not be given credence by a senior figure in the organisation that styles itself the intellectual leader of the tripartite alliance.
Mantashe missed an opportunity to demonstrate that he is more than a populist. He should have warned party members not to participate in the politics of innuendo; instead he actively encouraged them. It is disingenuous for the SACP to pretend that theirs is a dispassionate call for the truth when they sing out so clearly.
We will know who the new leader of the ANC is in December. But the truth about Chris Hani will now be harder to establish.
Go see it
The irony would be funny if it were not so tragic: a broadcaster tried to take the Mail & Guardian to court this week to stop a broadcast. We refer to the SABC’s aborted move to stop a series of screenings of the Unauthorised: Thabo Mbeki documentary.
This coincided with the M&G‘s disclosure, in this week’s lead story, of serious corruption in the SABC’s legal division, which, because it manages all the broadcaster’s contracts and relationships, should be a model of good governance. Yet the board appears to be sitting on the audit report, which details the graft and mismanagement.
The screening that the corporation tried to scotch forms part of a freedom of expression tour by Broad Daylight Films, which produced the short film; the Harold Wolpe Trust; the Freedom of Expression Institute and the M&G. It has been organised because the SABC has refused for more than a year to broadcast the documentary. Its reasons run the full length of Excuse Alley, from complaints that the film fell short of the brief (the producers warned the SABC that it would do so, but were told to continue) and is defamatory (it is not) to claims of an ownership and copyright battle.
The film is playing to packed audiences — South Africans have always been a people who like to see for themselves. And what have they seen? A well-cut, pacy work that tells us little we did not already know about the president. The consensus in the audience at this week’s screening was “what’s the fuss?”
The real fuss should be that our public broadcaster is in the hands of cautious nannies who constantly second-guess the politicians they are afraid of offending. It suffers from what freedom of expression advocate Jane Duncan calls a “climate of timidity”.
The SABC also tried to interdict the M&G last year over the report into blacklisting, which it refused to release. This year, it threatened interdicts in the soccer broadcasting rights dispute. It is a tragedy that an organisation whose main concern should be to promote the free flow of information should so regularly set out to staunch it.