Television, not books, played a big part in my education. As a family, we even ate our meals in front of the TV. And not today’s satellite TV, with multiple channels and the various streaming services, but good, old-fashioned SABC. Yes, we did get M-Net but, prior to that, from when it first came online in 1976, and during most of the 1980s, we watched apartheid-approved TV.
We watched everything, from Mid-Week to Police File, The A-Team, Iron Horse, The High Chaparral and, of course, Dallas. I was raised by my widowed mom, who had to work. Myself and my elder brother and sister generally took care of each other before and after school and therefore my copious TV consumption was unsupervised.
Being left alone, and being able to watch whatever we wanted to, allowed us as kids to learn how to distinguish between fact and fiction. Although the news was censored by the apartheid state, we were able to read between the lines. No one needed to tell us that certain facts were being deliberately selected, while others were conveniently ignored, to make us think in a particular way.
When the apartheid prime minister PW Botha declared he would be willing to release Nelson Mandela and talk to the ANC if they renounced violence, my initial reaction was that he was being reasonable. But I had to ask, “Who is this ANC and Mandela?” I then learnt from different sources that the ANC was leading a struggle for South Africa to be an equal society, with rights for all.
Many of us have learnt to consume the news with a level of cynicism and doubt. We do not necessarily fall for crackpot conspiracies but acknowledge that we are often not being told the whole truth, just the section of it that reinforces one or other narrative.
The streaming service Paramount+ is airing the thriller mini-series Rabbit/Hole, starring Kiefer Sutherland. It’s about a grand conspiracy, over decades, involving psychological triggers that make the masses think in a specific way.
In episode 4, a social media blogger says: “Billionaires bankrolled vaccines to insert nanodevices into every American, which the NSA, using the 5G spectrum, can use to control us.
“If you are one of the millions of Americans who believed this to be true, then you are a victim of a massive disinformation operation intended to distract you from the real truth, the real conspiracy. The real truth is that a cabal of the rich and powerful are working behind the scenes to consolidate their control over every aspect of American society.
“You buy what they want you to buy, you click on what they want you to click on. You stare at their screens, oblivious to the fact that their hands are in your pocket. Wake up, sheeple!”
Sound familiar? I am sure it does.
As the official flight from Tanzania touched down in South Africa, with escaped rapist and murderer Thabo Bester on board, I wondered how the story of his various exploits has managed to dominate the front pages of mainstream news outlets over the past few weeks. Was this a weapon of mass distraction? I don’t think so, because our government and its officials are not that sophisticated.
But without getting ourselves tied into too many knots, we need to question why certain issues are placed higher than others. And why any view counter to the dominant (meta)narrative is dismissed with angry disdain or ridiculed.
In the US and Britain, we are witnessing the removal of political opponents through judicial and administrative processes.
As much as many of us are disgusted with former US president Donald Trump, we know there are forces that would relish removing him as a political factor. Trump refused to take the US to war — a major inconvenience in an economy based on a military-industrial complex.
In Britain, the Labour Party has blocked Jeremy Corbyn from standing as a Labour candidate. They have created the unbelievable narrative that Corbyn is anti-Semitic, because he supports Palestinian liberation and is critical of Israel. An Israel, mind you, that is experiencing a social uprising because of the fascist nature of the political leadership.
In the US, there is a convenient meeting of minds between the Republican and Democrat elites on Ukraine, Russia and China (as well as Trump), and in Britain, the traditional left and right political wings agree on green renewable energy. It is a discussion that focuses solely on European survival and existentialism, with not a word written or spoken about Africa, South America and parts of Southeast Asia — the under-developed world.
Our debate on what should be done about Eskom is polluted by these global developments. Just as Zambia was the guinea pig for structural adjustment programmes in the past century, it is expected that South Africa will be the test site for renewable energy as the primary source. South Africa is required to borrow trillions from Western countries and contract those same countries’ companies to build the grid for renewable energy.
Anyone countering this narrative is accused of dismissing the corruption within Eskom and the government, as well as wanting to maintain coal as the primary source for electricity generation.
And thus we do not have a grand conspiracy as suggested in the Rabbit/Hole series but we are being led down the proverbial garden path. We are being told what we must accept and what we should not.
We are afraid to talk about situations like these because of the high-handed manner in which our society deals with dissenters.
We have not only lost our ability to read between the lines but to hold ourselves and those leading society accountable. Our media, which should be our megaphone, point to dwindling profits and social media, when we question their capability. But, for example, they do not contract and/or employ an energy expert to interview and question the minister of electricity.
Journalists often dumb down the debate into gossip about Andre de Ruyter and the machinations within Eskom. We have had the most ignominious situation, where a prisoner allegedly escaped from a maximum security prison by faking his death, and not a single news publication has publicly called out the minister of correctional services, his director general and the head of the prison, for not holding a press conference to explain the coverup and the numerous systemic failures. But the minister can hold a “celebratory” press conference when the fugitives are captured and brought back to South Africa.
Clearly, this does not help us as a country.
The media cannot continue to be highly regarded but not fill their newsrooms with experts. It seems the president and the rest of the political appointees are of the view that they only need to express accountability through parliament. As much as the public might have been titillated by the Democratic Alliance’s Glynnis Breytenbach grilling officials from the G4S-run prison from which Bester escaped in the parliamentary portfolio committee, this was merely theatre, with no meaningful impact.
For all of former president Thabo Mbeki’s so-called aloofness, he had regular interviews and discussions with business and labour leaders, as well as engagements with editors and senior journalists. Even during Jacob Zuma’s time as president there were the Gupta New Age breakfast engagements with ministers.
Why is President Cyril Ramaphosa being let off the hook? When has he ever fielded questions with followup with the media and experts? He came into office as a world-renowned democrat, a person closely associated with the ethos and spirit of our Constitution, but since then he has inculcated a political culture that shuns accountability.
Our silence must not be interpreted as acquiescence. We must retain the ability to read between the lines, and if the media does not raise our issues, we must find our own ways to raise them.
South Africans are not sheeple, we are people, and will be heard, sooner or later!