This is the week when Grahamstown’s Grocott’s Mail newspaper finalises legal papers to protest against an advertising boycott by the local city council.
The case concerns the actions of four officials, who will now be diverting scarce municipal resources to defend the impending action.
As chairperson of the board of the paper, I learnt of the problem in May last year, when the municipality issued an internal order that council advertising was no longer to be placed in Grocott’s.
That ruling followed our coverage of R13-million missing in the council, and a flood of letters criticising a column by municipal manager Pravine Naidoo. His article had ignored the issue and accused Grocott’s of being anti-transformation.
We tried several times to meet the council — but instead met only dismissals from Naidoo. He pompously declared — twice — that talks ”would be ”an exercise in futility”.
After several appeals to his senior, the executive mayor, Phumelelo Kate, two face-to-face engagements took place. In the second, the meeting’s chairperson, councillor Mxolisi Ntshiba, admitted forthrightly that the boycott was political.
He even condemned the paper for having run letters from readers who were opposed to the municipality’s push to rename the city — a narrow view of the role of a community paper if ever there was one.
Sitting in that very meeting was municipal spokesperson Thandi Matebese. Despite Ntshiba’s explicit remarks, Matebese within a week was claiming in public that the ban was a purely economic decision. He further asserted that the choice of a rival Grahamstown newspaper for council ads was because it was cheaper.
In fact, our legal papers include an affidavit from the owners of that publication. It proves exactly the contrary. In other words, in punishing Grocott’s, the city council since last May has been spending taxpayers’ money on an unnecessarily more expensive product.
Worse, because Grocott’s is audited as being the widest-circulating medium in Grahamstown, residents’ rights to municipal information have become a casualty of the council’s campaign against Grocott’s. Citizens don’t get to see tenders, job adverts, water cut-off notices and so forth.
At the time when the council failed to respond to our requests to meet, Grocott’s resorted to the Promotion of Access to Administrative Justice Act to demand reasons for the boycott. The municipal manager failed to meet the legal deadline for this, leaving the council highly exposed. In terms of the law, the boycott is now deemed invalid unless the council can now demonstrate otherwise.
Last week, we had a surprise when the municipality interrupted its ban by placing an advert in Grocott’s. A change of policy? Not quite.
The subject matter was the council’s process regarding changing the name of the town — an issue that has evoked widespread criticism in some local quarters, and apathy in others.
So, why was there an advertising exception on this particular issue? No doubt in order to claim to have consulted as widely as possible. In other words, an entirely expedient decision.
It is exactly this arbitrary power to turn advertising on or off for purely political reasons that Grocott’s is challenging. We are asking the courts to set aside the council’s decision and thereby send out a signal that advertising is not up for political abuse.
It is a struggle to show that a democracy has no place for economic censorship of the media, and has significance much beyond a small-town paper that has survived since 1870 — and refuses to bend to pressure today.