Beware fuss and fury designed to distract from Zupta thievery
• Free education plan merely a ploy to deflect attention from Eskom, SARS, grants and graft
Hats off to Victoria Geoghegan. Although she was officially relieved of her position at Bell Pottinger in July 2017, I have no doubt she is still working closely with the Zuptas and their affiliates. I say this because of the excellent campaign running to distract the South African public from the true awfulness of Jacob Zuma’s presidency.
I am, of course, talking about the proposed free tertiary education policy.
While many people are debating the merits and the madness of the plan (including drastic cuts to social grants and infrastructural spending, as well as an increase in value-added tax) fewer are paying attention to Eskom’s liquidity crisis, the collapse of the South African Revenue Service or the chaos in the governing party.
More to the point, hardly anyone seems to have noticed the various credit officials from the World Bank, IMF and African Development Bank who have been in and out of the country since October’s medium-term budget policy statement.
Even the fact that prominent #FeesMustFall leader Mukovhe Morris Masutha was recently exposed as an employee of the State Security Agency during his time as a student activist is more of a Zupta win than a loss.
In an ideal world, this information would undermine the credibility of the #FeesMustFall movement, but for those who thrive on chaos, it is more useful than damaging because it muddies the water even further.
The same goes for the revelation that the same Morris Masutha dated Zuma’s daughter, Thuthukile. If your goal is to distract rather than inform, that little nugget is a perfect story for the tabloids to run with, not a big communication crisis.
As things stand, stories such as these do little to damage the credibility of the Zuma administration in the eyes of the public. All they do is take up space in media that could be carrying other news that would be even more damaging to Zuma and his cronies. And that is exactly their purpose. Chaos is the enemy of truth because it makes it difficult for the public to know who or what to believe.
By creating stories or events that are unbelievable or sensational, the public’s attention is not only diverted from the real issues at hand but their general levels of trust become undermined or fatigued.
This is important because I can tell you right now, Zuma’s free education plan is never going to happen. It is a political and communications tool – nothing more.
The fact that the Heher commission found that there is no capacity for the government to provide free tertiary education to all students in the country is almost irrelevant, because the establishment of the commission was itself a political response and – depending on how cynical you are – part of a wider political strategy.
The mechanics of this sort of campaign are fairly simple: leak a plan that the president is going to announce a completely unfounded and populist policy shift and then sit back and watch how public attention shifts from the real crisis at hand to the newly manufactured one. From a communications perspective, this sort of tactic achieves a similar effect to finding “a good day to bury bad news”.
In a now infamous memo, UK press officer Jo Moore wrote to her colleagues — as millions of people were glued to their television sets watching the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre — that “It is now a very good day to get out anything we want to bury.” I can’t help but wonder if she went to the same school as Geoghegan.
Another example of a distraction campaign that was possibly masterminded by Geoghegan is what happened around the release of Jacques Pauw’s book The President’s Keepers.
Along with two “cease and desist” letters served to Pauw by the State Security Agency, the agency also laid “criminal charges” against him at Lyttelton police station in Pretoria.
In this case, the tactic has probably backfired due to the huge amount of public support Pauw has received, but I’m sure at least part of the intention of laying charges had been to deflect media attention from the disclosures in the book.
Indeed, you don’t need to look far on Twitter to see how hard the many Guptabots have been working to try and discredit Pauw as an “apartheid spy” or similar.
What is really frustrating is that if diversion tactics like these work well, they can result in knock-on effects that not only give the initial story legs, but in some cases even result in completely new stories or create a platform for fake news stories.
This is great if you are the mastermind trying to change the direction of a public narrative, but has a terrible effect on the public’s pursuit of truth.
For example, earlier this week the head of the budget office in the Treasury, Michael Sachs, resigned from his position, ostensibly because of the proposed free tertiary education plan. Please don’t get me wrong; I have nothing but admiration and sympathy for Sachs, and his resignation is a huge blow to Treasury, but if I were doing communications for the Zuptas, this would have been another story that grabbed headlines away from the details of the damage the Zuptas have done to this country.
Yes, the narrative is that Sachs probably resigned because of political interference, and this adds credence to the wider narrative about the way Zuma’s administration functions, but Sachs is still the subject of that story, not the Zuptas.
And for someone trying to deflect attention from the Zuptas, this is a win. This is exactly how Zuma and the Guptas have managed to get as far as they have, and we must do our best to focus on them and not the sideshows.
ZUMA’S FREE EDUCATION PLAN IS NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN. IT IS A POLITICAL AND COMMUNICATIONS TOOL — AND NOTHING MORE