South Africa: Little hope of new brush sweeping SABC clean [opinon]

In her letter responding to the concerns I raised in a column last month about SABC CEO Solly Mokoetle, newly appointed board member Pippa Green carefully avoids answering most of the questions I posed. She ignores most of the examples I cited and, in effect, says that any management or news corruption that occurred at the SABC happened either before Mokoetle was appointed to a position of influence or after he left.

In a specious attempt to prove this, she avers that neither she nor Jimi Matthews, when they were head of radio and television news respectively, ever received an order from Mokoetle to suppress news. He did not have to. It was on Mokoetle’s watch, for example, that Peter Matlare sought to impose the Mbeki regime’s edicts on the newsroom, resulting in the resignation of the principled Barney Mthombothi. Censorship by omission did not abate in the two-year period when Snuki Zikalala was at the Department of Labour, and it continues to this day.

An example from my monitoring of the SABC’s news coverage in Cape Town occurred from 2001 to 2006, when the African National Congress (ANC ) controlled the Cape Town municipality. More than R1bn was channelled out of municipal coffers through tender scams such as Big Bay, Jewellery City and N2 Gateway/BTH Construction, which were not mentioned on SABC news bulletins, let alone headlined as these stories constantly were in the SABC’s opposition media.

I have, for years, written about this 24/7 news corruption in the Western Cape without denial or explanation from the SABC or the ANC.

Former members of the SABC’s Sea Point office have told opposition party members on the parliamentary portfolio committee on communication that, for the past decade, they have been forbidden by the deployed ANC cadre, regional editor Jeffrey Twala, from covering any story that did not reflect well on the ruling party. This was confirmed by Zwelakhe Sisulu and advocate Gilbert Marcus in their report on the SABC’s blacklisting scandal, and they urged the SABC to intervene. It did not happen then and will not happen now because there is an election coming up and the ANC has picked a new board, which is strongly allied with it and has not a single person who represents Afrikaans interests.

On her blanket denial that there has been any censorship by omission by the SABC of the arms deal scandal, Green and Mokoetle need to provide documentary evidence that they vehemently opposed Matlare’s attempt — unjustly known as the “Judy Nwokedi memo” — to intimidate SABC staffers into not covering allegations at the time that President Jacob Zuma was involved in arms deal corruption and to explain why, despite having substantially more resources than e.tv, the Mail & Guardian and Carte Blanche, the SABC has never done a single investigative report on this scandal or broken any significant new angle on it.

Green claims that the Eskom blackouts started only in 2008, which is untrue. They started on November 11 2005 when, at noon, Cape Town was plunged into chaos by the first of such blackouts. I challenge Mokoetle and Green to call a press conference and to show, back to back, the 7pm TV news bulletins from the SABC and e.tv from that night and to explain the difference between the two. They need to tell us what they plan to do about it and when, not if, they plan to release the unexpurgated 2000-page report on the blacklisting scandal.

Has it escaped the notice of Mokoetle and Green that, subsequent to their appointment, the Sunday Times broke the news on January 31 of the birth of Zuma’s latest child, a story that was instantly and negatively headlined locally and the world over, but that the state broadcaster suppressed this for three days until Zuma issued a statement on the matter? Is that not a continuation of unconstitutional and illegal news censorship by omission as usual, Ms Green? Too happy to have your job back in another form, I hope you will not continue to spin and justify the excesses of the public broadcaster, but clean it up. Deployed cadres ignore customers’ complaints at their peril.

R Kadalie is a human rights activist based in Cape Town.

- February 25, 2010 by Rhoda Kadalie

……………..

Source: www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx (accessed on 26.02.10)