Former president Jacob Zuma.
It is a futile exercise to consider the “what ifs” in the context of the life of a country. For as much as we can pontificate over bad decisions of times past that affect us today, the reality is that we have no choice but to live through them. But having said that, there certainly are lessons that we can take from our more recent history to ensure they aren’t repeated if we are to preserve our young and still fragile democracy.
This week, the newsroom received what was supposedly an official “intelligence report” containing all manner of allegations against the South African judiciary, in effect accusing it of being corrupt. The report was purportedly drafted by the recently resigned director general of the State Security Agency, but was quickly dismissed by the country’s intelligence services.
News24 subsequently confirmed that the author of the report was a disgruntled advocate. The onus was on all of us in the media not to hurry for the juicy headlines that the allegations offered, but to get to the source of the report and better understand its objectives. It’s something that in years past – especially during Jacob Zuma’s term and the period leading up to it – the media wasn’t paying much attention too. There’s a graveyard of former investigative journalists who were thrown under the bus by embarrassed editors once a big investigation was found to be untrue.
After Zuma’s 2005 sacking as Thabo Mbeki’s deputy, his rise to Union Buildings was a road paved with conspiracy cooked up by all manner of spooks on the dime of taxpayers. Intelligence reports were being spread around all the major newsrooms and dropped in strategic dustbins across Johannesburg detailing the nefarious activities of individuals caught up in the various factional plays in the ANC. The air was thick with conspiracy that in time would either prove fake or, in the best case scenario, incomplete.
Starting from the “Browse Mole” report, which spoke of an Angolan intelligence establishment planning to covertly support Zuma’s presidential bid, to the 2005 hoax emails that fuelled the idea of a conspiracy against Zuma that helped win over then ANC secretary general Kgalema Motlanthe to his camp, and we can never forget reports about the South African Revenue Service (Sars) rogue unit.
We fed on these reports from spooks hellbent on bending democratic processes in their favour. What if Motlanthe wasn’t duped? Would we have avoided a Zuma presidency? Stories about the “rogue unit” within Sars destabilised the institution and in turn weakened the credibility of our fiscus.
As established media, lessons have been learned and there’s greater scrutiny of the often badly grammared intelligence reports from Pretoria. But the advent of social media over the past decade has provided a platform for “spooks” to stir through everything from WhatsApp to Facebook. By stirring fervour through these platforms, a democracy can crack, as we saw in the 2021 July unrest.
How it is policed without taking away our hard-fought freedoms seems near impossible with social media operators insistent that they aren’t publishers. In the absence of multinational regulation, we will to have to remain on guard as “intelligence reports” flood our system ahead of the 2024 elections as we defend our democracy.