”What would you do if, for R2,6-million, you had to choose between God and Mugabe?” is the cryptic question Afrikaans musician and author Koos Kombuis is asking visitors to his blog this week.
Earlier this year, Cape Town-based media conglomerate Naspers refused to print his latest book, The Complete Secret Diaries of God, because of ”offensive [religious] content”.
Then Kombuis discovered last weekend that the company was prepared to sup with the Devil. It had signed a R2,6-million contract to print propaganda for Zanu-PF to be used in the party’s blood-soaked election run-off campaign.
Caxton reportedly refused the job.
”The printers themselves decided they didn’t like the content [of my book] because they felt it was offensive. The double standards here are even more offensive,” Kombuis told the Mail & Guardian.
”They took the time to read an unimportant book, but then they get a big job and they decide not to look at where it came from.
”If I paid them [Naspers] three million bucks they would have printed my book. Money talks in this situation.”
Kombuis’s satire is an expanded version of The Secret Diary of God, which he first published in 2003. It describes a fictional God being taken to a prison called Beverly Hills and only escaping after he volunteers to be the Grim Reaper.
The book also deals with the Devil’s ”plan B”, the politics of heaven and hell and Paul’s letters to the Americans.
Stephen van der Walt, CEO of Naspers’s subsidiary Paarl Web, confirmed the Kombuis publishing incident but insisted it has been amicably resolved.
He questioned why Kombuis would bring it up now.
Van der Walt said the Zanu-PF job was given to them by an old client and he only took it because no one in the sales and production departments had seen what was to be printed.
On June 13 Business Day reported that an agent had approached Caxton to print ”a million copies of a high-quality booklet on why people should vote Zanu-PF”.
According to the report, about R3-million was transferred into the company’s bank account. It only pulled out when its chaiperson, Frederik van Zyl Slabbert, threatened to resign if the job went ahead.
When Naspers agreed to do the job, journalists working for various titles of Naspers subsidiary Media24 forwarded a petition to group chairperson Ton Vosloo asking him to donate the proceeds to charities working with Zimbabwean refugees.
”You, as a journalist, will understand that accepting the contract places the editorial staff and publications in an uncomfortable position,” the petition reads.
”Our publications have taken a position against any organisation supporting President Robert Mugabe’s regime, financially or otherwise. We have been very critical of our own government’s handling of the Zimbabwean situation.
”The acceptance of the Zanu-PF contract constitutes, at the very least, a very serious lack of judgement, and we hope that Naspers, as the parent company of Paarl Web, will acknowledge this.”
Naspers has emphasised that no direct contact with Zimbabwe or Zanu-PF took place during the transaction.
It would not confirm whether Peter Mancer of Diversity Management had brokered the deal, as reported.
Van der Walt said Naspers regretted taking on the job and would donate the R300 000 profits from the deal to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in Zimbabwe.