Mbalula dodges plagiarism claims

It is well known that outgoing ANC Youth League president Fikile Mbalula is an activist at heart. He thinks like an activist, he speaks like an activist and now he writes, word-for-word, like an activist.

Five years ago Oxfam copyrighted a document by Kevin Watkins and Penny Fowler called From Rigged Rules and Double Standards: Trade, Globalization and the Fight Against Poverty — a carefully researched critique of global trade practices.

Mbalula claims he is unaware that an article he wrote, titled A Hurdle Race Rigged Against the Poor, for the ANC newsletter, Umrambulo, in November 2007 is nearly identical to the 2002 Oxfam document.

Based on a comparison of the texts, approximately 76% of Mbalula’s article bears a conspicuous resemblance to Oxfam’s — whole paragraphs are virtually indistinguishable. In the Umrambulo piece there is no reference to Oxfam or Watkins and Fowler. The blurb to the article makes the attribution clear: ‘Global solidarity to build a fair trade system is the choice we must all make, writes Fikile Mbalula.”

Despite Mbalula claiming to have ‘not read it, seen it or heard of it”, the similarities vary from obvious to striking.

Watkins and Fowler write: ‘The problem of low and unstable commodity prices, which consigns million of people to poverty, has not been seriously addressed by the international community”.

Mbalula writes: ‘The international community has failed to address the problem of low and unstable commodity prices, which consign millions of people to poverty.”

The only difference between the passages is that Mbalula’s is set in the active, rather than the passive voice. Watkins and Fowler write: ‘Trade is one of the most powerful forces linking our lives. It is also a source of unprecedented wealth.”

Mbalula writes: ‘Trade is one of the most powerful forces linking our lives, and a source of unprecedented wealth.”

This time the sentence is duplicated exactly, except that Mbalula went through the trouble of using a conjunction where Watkins and Fowler had not.

Watkins and Fowler write: ‘Large parts of the developing world are becoming enclaves of despair, increasingly marginalised and cut off from the rising wealth generated through trade.”

Mbalula writes: ‘Large parts of the developing world are becoming enclaves of despair, increasingly marginalised and cut off from the rising wealth generated through trade.”

Here there is no attempt to cover up; the pupil is clearly hopeful the teacher hasn’t seen the original work.

The original report clearly attributes copyright to Oxfam and only segments of the portable document format (PDF) file are free to view on the internet — it cannot be copied, as the file is password protected. The article can be purchased from Amazon.com at $20,75 (R162,90)

After having read the title of the Oxfam document no fewer than four times, Mbalula told the Mail & Guardian that he was ‘very sure” that he was a complete stranger to it. He assured us that everything he knew about global markets came from the writings of American economist Joseph Stiglitz and laughed off the notion that he had plagiarised anyone else’s writing.

Which leaves the rest of us pondering how phenomenally similar his thoughts on unfair global trade were to the authors’. Not that this is a bad thing — if enough voices send the same message, we might just create a fairer global trade system.

Oxfam seems unperturbed and even a little flattered that Mbalula has dipped so heavily into their work. In what appears to be a tongue-in-cheek response, implying that if politicians must plagiarise them they should use more recent reports, Nombuso Shabalala, media and communications officer for Oxfam South Africa, said: ‘Oxfam produces reports on important development topics in order to inform people and influence interventions to end poverty and suffering.”

She added that they were ‘happy that senior political figures, such as Mbalula and others, with an ability to influence policy direction are making use of these reports and hope that they continue to use more recent reports on trade and other topics that are available on [the Oxfam] website”.

ANC national spokesperson Jesse Duarte said that ‘if Umrambulo has published something that has not been properly sourced, [they] will certainly investigate and make whatever amends are necessary”.