It is one of the toughest reporting challenges for South Africa and no doubt the most important: understanding in its proper context the awful cleavage of poverty and inequality that cuts across the national landscape.
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Because the problem is so large and its impacts so broadly spread, our media, including the Mail &Guardian, struggle to focus on it.
This was understood by the late Eugene Saldanha, activist, civil society leader and policy adviser, whose life’s work was fighting for social justice.
To commemorate that work and give expression to the insights that animated it, the M&G and Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) Southern Africa have created an annual fellowship in social-justice reporting.
The Eugene Saldanha Memorial Fund Fellowship will enable a young journalist to spend a year working at the paper on poverty, inequality and the realisation of human and socioeconomic rights.
The fund, which will finance the fellowship, is administered by CAF Southern Africa, which Saldanha founded. It is supported by individual donations and the generosity of international private foundations with which he was associated.
As CAF Southern Africa chief executive Colleen du Toit says: “Eugene played a key role in strengthening South Africa’s civil society sector; he believed in the critical role of the sector in building and maintaining constitutional democracy. He set up and led two important NGOs: the Non-Profit Partnership and then CAF Southern Africa.
“He was influential in advocating parliamentary reforms in regard to the enabling environment for civil-society organisations and was a leader in lobbying government to fulfil its responsibility to the sector,” she says.
Earlier, says Du Toit, Saldanha worked as a journalist at The Star. He had a lifelong passion about the content and standards of journalism and was critical of cultures of self-enrichment that were rapidly emerging alongside worsening levels of poverty and inequality.
“Freedom of the press was, for Eugene, an absolute non-negotiable and within that independence he wanted to see increased exposure of persistent injustice, inequity and discrimination,” she says.
The M&G and CAF Southern Africa believe the fellowship will enable a reporter to do just that.