Your article, ”Jara axed from media agency”, in your October 3 to 9 edition insults me as a professional and a woman.
I am, as you like reminding everyone, wife to Blade Nzimande, general secretary of the SACP, and I have been so for 25 years. It appears, based on your report on my appointment to the Media Development and Diversity Agency (MDDA), that as Nzimande’s wife I should be precluded from any position or institution.
By extension you imply my professional career has nothing to do with my credentials but piggybacks on Nzimande’s influence. Even though you are supposedly progressive, you regularly subject wives of prominent people to this interpretation, ignoring the fact that professionally we stand on our own capabilities. The suggestion that we can be powerhouses only because of our husbands is annoying to say the least.
I have been a political gender activist for most of my life. President Nelson Mandela appointed me and others to the first Commission on Gender Equality. When the National Party ascribed my appointment to Nzimande’s political affiliation I understood it as political point-scoring. That 14 years into democracy a so-called progressive paper does something similar pains me less because I am affected but more because it suggests a dearth of quality journalism.
When your journalist contacted me I asked if he had read the MDDA Act. He responded in the negative. I advised him to read it, thinking that your paper had an opportunity to inform the public about the MDDA and interrogate its capacity to meet its critical mandate.
At no stage did your journalist raise Nzimande’s name. Such ambush journalism is unprofessional and unethical. Your insinuation that my position on matters within the SABC depends on Nzimande’s politics is particularly galling.
It denudes me of my intellectual and corporate governance capacity, turning me into a stooge for forces outside my sphere of influence. You have done this previously, citing a vehicle that belongs to me as evidence of his bourgeois life. I am a professional in my own right — as my inclusion in your publication on SA women leaders attests.
Finally, your reference to my having authorised SABC expenditure in ”Leadership” is extremely opportunistic. Not only are you denigrating me by saying I paid the magazine ”for carrying a cover photograph of Mpofus”, but you are also lying outright, as you know the payment was for editorial space to communicate our strategy.
When the SABC advertises in your paper you raise no qualms. Please note that professionally, given similar corporate publicity requirements, I would take the same decision and continue endorsing SABC initiatives to communicate our strategy to various stakeholders and on various platforms.
It is journalism like this that raises questions about the quality of journalism in our country — questions which some then conveniently interpret as an almighty threat to media freedom.