e.tv should start shopping for some anti-slash vests

The South African government is understandably perturbed at the prospect of thousands of World Cup soccer fans arriving wearing anti-slash vests under their supporter kit. After all, as the saying goes, don’t bring a knife to a gunfight.

News that a British company was gleefully exploiting visceral European fears of the Dark Continent to sell the vest, which protects against knife attack but not bullets, highlight government’s conundrum. On the one hand it wants fans to take reasonable precautions; on the other hand, it doesn’t want to scare them witless.

Government knows that it is statistically probable that 99,9% of the soccer tourists will leave unharmed. It also knows that it would only take a couple of murderous encounters for the international media to go berserk, ruining the soccer spectacle and effectively killing SA’s prospects of bidding for an Olympics — a long-term although unstated ambition behind the billions spent on showpiece stadiums.

There are many reasons for the overseas media’s palpitations, bordering on hysteria, about the supposed dangers of travelling to SA. Interwoven are aspects of parochialism, ignorance and racism.

Nevertheless, anywhere in the world the death of a foreign tourist is always going to evoke a strong response from their home country. The SA government is in the international spotlight and for the first time cannot just shrug off violent crime as a racist perception.

This belated realisation lies behind an invitation to cops who had resigned — mostly squeezed out to meet demographic targets limiting whites — to reapply. This is also a sign, perhaps, of President Jacob Zuma’s promised pragmatic and more reconciliatory approach.

One can only hope the move survives beyond the exigency of more cops for the World Cup. Just imagine the benefits flowing from the re-employment of thousands of well-qualified, experienced, non-black teachers, engineers, technicians and civil servants, who despite commitment to a democratic SA, bit the dust after 1994 because of their skin colour.

But while the government can’t afford to fail the World Cup test, neither should it over-react. Its response to an e.tv interview with two hoods who disclosed supposed plans to rob tourists and kill any cops in their way, has been as knee-jerk as some of the coverage of SA’s hosting of the tournament.

The cops are resorting to an old apartheid-regime law to force the e.tv journalists to reveal their sources, apparently so that the criminals can be arrested for “public intimidation”. Of course, if the police were going charge with intimidation everyone who threatened to kill someone, the entire executive of the ANC Youth League would be sitting in the chookie.

The e.tv interview was, however, every bit as “gratuitously sensationalist” as Police Minister Nathi Mthethwa described it. Its airing was ill-considered, not because it was “unpatriotic”, given the effect it could have on prevaricating would-be visitors or the encouragement it offered would-be thugs, but because it smells disquietingly of hit-and-run journalism.

Two unidentified black men threatening to rob and kill are given extensive publicity, feeding every negative cliché there is about SA. Yet e.tv doesn’t even know who the identities of the men and has zero evidence that they are criminals. It believes them to be criminals, it would appear, entirely on the say so of the two men, the middle-man, and the reporter.

e.tv argues that since they did not pay the “criminals” nor the intermediary, who has since committed suicide, why would the men agree to appear on television, incognito, unless they were indeed criminals? Well, half a dozen reasons spring to mind.

e.tv shouldn’t give into police bullying by giving up its sources but it does need to convince us it took every precaution to assure itself of of the report’s journalistic soundness and that has to go beyond blind trust of its reporter. If it cannot, it should buy those responsible some anti-slash jackets and set the hounds loose.