Eight bells toll for Dali -- Snuki to follow?

The SABC Board has decided to part ways with its suspended group chief executive officer Advocate Dali Mpofu who has vowed to fight the decision. The purported grounds for Mpofu’s dismissal being his failure to implement decisions taken by the board. The question that immediately springs to mind then is how soon will Snuki Zikalala follow Mpofu?

“The concept of press freedom is a universal one and simple in its essence. It amounts to no more and no less than the elementary right of all people to have unfettered access to the means of truly expressing their opinions and conversely having access to media that fully reflect their life experience and their aspirations.

“Press freedom therefore is not the exclusive right of the press or the media generally. It is an inherent right of all people everywhere.

“As such it is entrenched in South Africa’s constitution; and our people’s elected representatives and society as a whole consider it their obligation to nurture freedom of the media and freedom of expression: to ensure that journalists are able to do their work without let or hindrance; fear of favour; and that citizens have access to information they need continually to change their lives for the better.” (Message by President Thabo Mbeki to mark World Press Freedom Day, May 3 2001)

“… the ANC under the Mbeki administration has created a range of promotional bodies dedicated to carrying a message of hope and resolution to the world through the simple expedient of excising all the bad news. Needless to say, it has not worked.” (Brian Pottinger, The Mbeki Legacy, Zebra Press, 2008″)

Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

John Donne

The use of “Eight bells” in the title of this piece arises out of its reference to an essay published by Anton Harber during October 2006. In it Harber comments on the fact that SABC news commissar and ANC deployed cadre (no longer permitted in many instances) Snuki Zikalala had been found to have breached the Corporation’s code of ethical news conduct no less than eight times by the Sisulu/Marcus Commission of Inquiry into the political blacklisting scandal,

The report of the Commission, which may also be found on the Freedom of Expression Institute’s website, makes for somewhat interesting reading. In most countries where media freedom is not only acknowledged, but respected and implemented, such conduct, which occasioned an extraordinarily illegal and unconstitutional negation of the people’s right to know, would have resulted in the immediate dismissal of the person concerned — somehow this was not the case in South Africa.

Both the now-fired Dali Mpofu and the Corporation’s hugely contentious board member, Christine Qunta, having stated that they fully supported and endorsed Zikalala’s news ethics and anyone who questions that is a racist.

Two recent events, however, indicate that eight bells may finally be tolling for Zikakala as well:

The most recent event was the brave and principled decision by two journalists, John Perlman and Pippa Green, to provide the Freedom of Expression Institute with affidavits testifying to Zikalala’s abuses. The FXI will include both affidavits in their submission to ICASA which will be heard in March.

The second is the statement by ANC MP, Lumka Yengeni, in parliament during the debate on the SABC Bill on August 19 last year: “The exoneration of Snuki Zikalala, without facing the disciplinary processes, is a serious precedent that insinuates that those who are close to the power are immune from disciplinary processes. Who should take responsibility for the exoneration of Snuki Zikalala, without facing disciplinary processes? Is it the responsibility of an individual or is it the collective responsibility of the board?”

The evidence presented by the FXI to ICASA may well be sufficiently compelling to provide the ANC-dominated Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Communication with the ammunition it needs to implement the outcome suggested by Ms Yengeni’s clearly rhetorical question.

The quote by Brian Pottinger (see above) refers to the unfortunate tendency of the SABC to introduce censorship by omission that seems to have become more and more prevalent ever since the ANC’s deployed cadres drove out a succession of journalists of integrity including Sarah Crowe, Max du Preez, Barney Mthomboti, Alistair Sparks and, more recently, Jimi Matthews, Karima Brown, Pippa Green, Charles Leonard, Jacques Pauw, John Perlman and others.

(FLASHBACK — SABC news boss leaves: the South African Broadcast Corporation (SABC) news head, Barney Mthomboti, has left the national broadcaster citing political interference as the reason for his resignation. According to the Sowetan (July 4 2002) and Citizen (July 5 2002) newspapers, government officials visited the broadcaster to express their concern about coverage they receive from the public broadcaster. The government is reported to be unhappy with the screening of Grootvlei Prison video tape that showed corrupt prison officers selling drugs and guns to inmates and also arranging sex between inmates.)

FXI
IOL
Daily Dispatch

In 2003 former SABC presenter Pat Rogers, then working for the Catholic community radio station Radio Veritas, observed that the SABC’s flagship evening English TV News bulletin had, in stark contrast to its opposition media, deliberately suppressed for two weeks the then significant news that the Scorpions were investigating ANC president Jacob Zuma for his alleged involvement in the arms deal. Rogers reported this to the Broadcasting Complaints Commission of South Africa (BCCSA), which ruled that while it could take action against the SABC for transgressions on programmes that had been broadcast, it could do nothing if the SABC chose to ignore a news story, thus depriving millions of SABC viewers of their constitutional right of freedom to access of information.

Subsequent to BCCSA’s finding, this tendency to omit items such as the arms deal seems to have gained momentum.

This may partly be down to Zikalala being a close confidante of Joe Modise, a man now acknowledged, even by the ANC’s Trevor Manuel, as being suspiciously involved in the arms deal (P177 After the Party by Andrew Feinstein (Jonathan Ball, 2007) In addition Zikalala was spokesman for the Modise family when Modise died.

Zikalala and Modise were also jointly accused at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of human rights abuses. The startling evidence of Olefile Samuel Mnqibisa, which can be found on the TRC webpage, begs the question of whether Zikalala can be considered a fit and proper person to be deciding on what some 27-million radio listeners and television watchers should be told.

Significantly, as Max du Preez points out in his book Pale Native — Memories of a Renegade Reporter (Zebra Press 2003), when this evidence was led, he allowed himself to be persuaded not to devote any airtime to it because Zikalala assured him that there was no truth in the allegations and that he, Zikalala, would take the stand at the TRC to rebut them. Why this has never happened is something that Zikalala might wish to enlighten us on.

Du Preez describes the incident: “I got to know Zikalala during my time with the Truth Commission. A former MK soldier, Olefile Samuel Mnqibisa had testified before the human rights violations hearings in Soweto on July 25 1996 that he was stationed in an ANC camp in Zambia in 1978. Zikalala was one of his commanders. Mnqibisa said that when he and other soldiers criticised Zikalala and others for the poor conditions in the camp, they were thrown in jail where Mnquibisa was subjected to solitary confinement and ill treatment. He listed the following people “who abused me”: Joe Modise, Keith Mikwepe, Snuki Zikalala and Solise Melani.

“Zikalala was a senior colleague of mine, so I talked to him before our next broadcast. He said Mnqibisa was lying and he would personally clear his name before the TRC. He never did.” (Page 256)

Subsequently, Du Preez, like so many after him, was driven out of the SABC by Zikalala or left because of him: “It later turned out that Zikalala himself had pushed for my dismissal. He explained to senior black colleagues, who in turn told me, that it was ‘symbolically important’ for the ‘Africanisation of the SABC’ to ‘crush’ the most senior white journalist in the Corporation, ‘as an example to other whites’. (In October 1997 he told an interviewer from the Mail & Guardian that he ‘used to hate everything to do with white people’ and that ‘it’s not easy to shake that passion’.”

Du Preez gave this chapter in his book the title of The Poor Man’s Stalin.

As the ANC Youth League put it, they are running the SABC like a “spaza shop” — a gratuitous and totally undeserved insult to most spaza shops you may have visited — as proof whereof have regard to the most recent SABC annual report.

It shows that profits for the financial year ending last March dropped 83% from R222-million to R38.4-million; that R1.5-billion in expenditure is simply not accounted for; that it wasted R76-million by purchasing programme material that it did not broadcast by the contracted date and accordingly cannot use; that it has spent R145-million without contracts and R330-million on unauthorised contracts; that it lost R2.5-million to theft and fraud; that it is facing litigation costs in excess of half a billion rand and that its expenditure on consultants has risen from R47-million to R226-million in the past two years. Needless to say, the annual report was delivered late and needless to say, despite this shocking record, suspended CEO Dali Mpofu received a bonus of R2.1-million in addition to his annual salary of R4.5-million.

A fish rots from the head as they say and what is troubling about this report is that the warning signs of questionable leadership were evident a long time ago but never acted upon. Perhaps SABC spokesman Kaizer Kganyago could tell us whether anyone even bothered to follow up on the damning allegations contained in this report from the Mail & Guardian.

What will further hammer the point home was the way in which the now-fired Mpofu hired his crony and business associate, Mafika Sihlali. An investigation into Sihlali started in July 2007 — 18 months ago — which begs the question of Kaizer Kganyago as to what progress has been made.

Business Day
Times

Perhaps the most telling testimony to the failure of Mpofu, Qunta, Zikalala and Manga et al is the way their only opposition, etv, has almost double the audience for its 7pm TV news bulletin than the SABC has for the equivalent slot — this despite the fact that etv’s signal does not reach nearly as many areas and despite the fact that etv does not receive billions of rand in subsidies from the government. This is democracy in action as viewers vote with their remotes and prove that you can’t fool all the people all the time. If the board and those now running the SABC newsroom can’t win with a deck so grossly weighted in their favour then they should be shown the door.

With the board having dismissed Mpofu, it remains to be seen whether the ANC succeeds in its clear ambition to see the back of Zikalala: “We want a non-partisan SABC, the one that is free from factions and free from Dali or Snuki influences; an SABC that can truly serve the nation,” ANC Secretary General, Gwede Mantashe, said last year.

Similarly determined, it would seem, is one of the ruling party’s alliance partners, the South African Communist Party. In a letter carried in the May 2008 issue of Umsebenzi, Joe Steelman wrote: “In 1993 the Campaign for Open Media (COM) paralleled their Board initiative with one to replace apartheid’s news commissars in the SABC. In 2008 we must remove the commissars of the 1996 Class Project — SABC head of news, Snuki Zikalala, Amrit Manga, Sophie Mokoena and others around him — and replace them with competent professionals able to give us news that is accurate and which enables us to take informed decisions.

“So: let’s start with Snuki!”

Cape Town-based human rights activist, Rhoda Kadalie, has said that freeing the SABC should be a national priority, a call for which there seems to be consensus across the political and ethnic divide.

Don’t however underestimate Zikalala’s survival instincts — two years ago he was quite happy to cancel a scheduled interview with Jacob Zuma, the man former president Thabo Mbeki clearly loathed. Now with Mbeki politically impotent and Zuma calling the shots, the SABC suddenly limits live coverage of the launch of the Cope manifesto — having previously devoted more than an hour’s live coverage to the equivalent launch by the ANC

Mpofu, pending a legal response to his dismissal, has gone. Zikalala’s contract apparently ends later this year with the possible scenario of him being allowed to see out the election and then given a, taxpayer-funded, golden handshake and perhaps the promise of lucrative sinecures elsewhere as an incentive to go quietly into the good night.

Unfortunately, with the election almost upon us, possibly the most important in South African history and the SABC’s vital role in reaching the masses, time is not on our side. This issue needs to be addressed urgently, transparently and with the attention to detail that it merits.

In the interests of us all.