Fight for Democracy. Glenda Daniels
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of constitutionality.4 For the state law advisor, Enver Daniels, however, the Protection of State Information Bill was meant to ‘balance’ the Promotion of Access to Information Act of 2000. He argued that the reactions by the press and civil society groupings (including Sanef, Print Media SA, FXI), the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (Idasa), South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) and the ANC’s own alliance partner, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu)) which had made submissions to Parliament, were ‘emotional and hysterical’ (The Star: 28 July 2010).
A third implication of this increasing intimidation of the free press arises from the arrest on 4 August 2010 of a Sunday Times investigative journalist, Mzilikazi wa Afrika, outside his newspaper offices in Rosebank, Johannesburg. While Sanef was engaged in a meeting with journalists (of whom I was one) to discuss the attempts at muzzling the media, the chairperson, Mondli Makhanya, asked what the commotion was outside. A few of us ran out and witnessed Wa Afrika being roughly handled by seven plain-clothes policeman who were escorting him to an awaiting police vehicle. The police said he was being arrested for ‘fraud’ and ‘defeating the ends of justice’ (Mail & Guardian: 13-19 August).5 It subsequently emerged that the ANC was unhappy about the exposures of divisions and fractures in the party’s leadership in Mpumalanga and the arrest was part of a strategy to stop Wa Afrika from his investigative reporting. The incident had a surreal quality about it, reminiscent of the dark old days of apartheid.
The deepening of South Africa’s democracy will depend upon acceptance and tolerance by the ANC and the government of media scrutiny of its performance. Pallo Jordan, who is a member of the ANC National Executive Committee (NEC) and chairperson of the NEC subcommittee on communication, and has always been regarded as one of the organisation’s intellectuals, made this point too. He wrote that in the spirit of the Constitution the value we place on a free independent and outspoken press in democratic South Africa cannot be overstated, and he asserted that:‘The ANC has not and shall not wilt under criticism or close scrutiny’ (The Times: 20 August 2010). He also wrote that his argument was within the tradition of the ANC itself: ‘The ANC has a long track record of commitment to media freedom. In defending a free media, we are defending the ANC’s own rich heritage … ’ (ANC Today: 20-26 August 2010). However, a mere month later, Jordan did an about-turn. He announced at a press conference after the ANC’s National General Council (NGC) on 24 September 2010 that the media appeals tribunal, which the organisation had resolved to take forward, was an indication of the ‘ANC’s commitment to press freedom’ (Sunday Independent: 24 October 2010), and that the media did not reflect the transition to democracy. ‘When you read our print media you never get a sense that this country is moving from an authoritarian state to democracy.’ He became even less a champion of an independent press and an open society when he later stated that ‘there is no country that has no secrets. The purpose of the Bill is to protect the secrets of this country’ (Mail & Guardian: 29 October - 4 November 2010).
The ANC as an organisation is not ideologically united, nor had it been left unscarred by the reports of the scandals of corruption exposed in the print media. Could this be why its leaders, including Zuma, Nyanda, Malema, Nzimande and Mthembu, wanted a media appeals tribunal, which aimed ultimately at political control of the media? The graphic on the next page by artist John McCann (Mail & Guardian: 20-26 August 2010) showed the exposures of corruption in the print media by the above leaders: ‘Nyanda’s five-star hotel binge’; ‘Blade’s [Nzimande] high life’; ‘Zuma for sale’; ‘Malema’s new tax dodge’; and ‘ANC leader’s jailhouse rock’, referring to a story about Mthembu’s drinking and driving.
But what are the problems with the media and the self-regulation system? Many other critics of the media, such as Lumko Mtimde (ANC Today: 30 July-5 August 2010) and Essop Pahad (speech delivered to Wits University Colloquium on ‘Media Freedom and Regulation’. University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. 15 September 2010), have argued that the existing self-regulatory system did not give sufficient protection to those whose rights to dignity (also protected in the Constitution) have been violated; that the Press Council was toothless as it did not levy fines while the corrections and apologies are not commensurate in size and placement to the damage done by the offending article; and the Press Council is composed mainly of former journalists.
Franz Kruger said at the colloquium on the media and self-regulation that some of the arguments from critics of the media needed to be considered and there should be more self-examination by journalists. ‘Some house-cleaning needs to happen and journalists need to be more careful’. Some of the issues raised in this respect included: the view that leaks should be handled with more care as journalists were vulnerable to manipulation; apologies were not commensurate with mistakes made; there should be a clearer distinction between reporting and commenting; and that there were far too many headlines which do not reflect the actual text of the story. These criticisms pointed out by Kruger and others at the event showed that the media was not above criticism and that there was a need for greater self-examination of the way in which it operated.
In support of a free press
The aim of this book is to unravel the politics of the independent media and the ANC through looking at specific case studies after apartheid, theorising trends, contradictions and splits, observations and reflections, and to produce findings about the intersection between the independent media and democracy. My aim is to limit the focus to particular examples of political interference. While I am aware of arguments from its detractors about the media’s commercial imperatives and how they impact, my main focus is on the ANC and the media.
By combining Mouffe’s conception of a radical democracy with Butler’s theories of power and subjection (wherein concepts such as ‘reflexive turn’, ‘subjectivisation’, ‘passionate attachments’ and ‘resignifications’ are applied, together with the Žižekean conceptual tools of Master-Signifier and social fantasy), a discussion, reflection and analysis of events regarding the media and the ANC since 1994 ensues. In addition, I examine what ‘turn’ journalists made in response to subjectivisation, or subjugation, that had already taken place and what this means for democracy in South Africa. Were these reflexive turns, as in turns against themselves, or were they resignifications and a break from the past, as in loyalties to the ANC because it was the liberation party which freed South Africa from colonial and racist oppression? (Resignification here means to not reiterate oppressive norms of the past; to detach oneself from past signifiers – resignification is a form of resistance, as in not acknowledging the name-calling.)
I use several specific examples, or ‘case studies’, in as many different chapters, to investigate the expectations of the ANC regarding the media and how the ANC imagines the media, as well as how the media itself defines its role. I then proceed to explore how the independence of the media is under threat.
It must also be said at the outset that I use the terms ‘the ANC’ and ‘the media’ in an affirmative deconstructive way – that is, I use the terms and interrogate them at the same time. When I write ‘the ANC’ I do not mean that the ANC is one ideological entity. I constantly attempt to show various strands of the ANC through its various discourses, and to capture the ambiguities, nuances and ambivalences within the organisation. In the same way, ‘the media’ is not a monolithic bloc, and this too is shown in the different issues analysed in the different chapters. The theoretical concepts used will be discussed in the forthcoming sections of this chapter, and will be further elucidated in the rest of the book.
The fundamental reason for writing this book is to preserve the free press from political interference as there have been several interjections in discourse since the advent of democracy which show that there are threats. In South Africa’s less than 20-year-old democracy, the ANC’s perspective is that the media’s role needs to be clarified, contained, and directed toward the project of nation-building and transformation as it has defined these processes. Thus the ANC sees itself as engineering democracy, a democracy that is transitional, in a society which remains unequal along racial and class lines.6 Should the media in fact be free and independent from