Groupthink rules, OK?
Gideon Pogrund certainly nailed it – South Africans are very much prone to following the leader, in politics as well as in business (Followers who are not sheep are key in preventing fleecing, February 2).
The individual who goes against the grain makes group thinkers uneasy. Rocking the boat is not popular with “people who align themselves with the supposed consensus”, as your columnist succinctly puts it. There’s a lot of comfort in being part of the herd.
The Steinhoff debacle is but one example, and followers of an erstwhile SA political party are another example. The Bernie Madoff scandal is another case in point. Top New Yorkers handed over their money and he lost it all for them. He could, in their eyes, do no wrong.
It also happens with the media, unfortunately. When I was in Baghdad in 2002 as a freelance writer, the press corps stayed at the same hotel and met around the same bar each night, exchanging notes. Hence the uniformity of reporting from that beleaguered city, leading up to the destruction of Iraq based on a lie. That George W Bush and Tony Blair could deceive never entered people’s heads.
I wrote a series of articles pointing out that there were no weapons of mass destruction (and the US knew this!) and that the anthrax story and the so-called yellowcake from Niger were humbug fabrications. I submitted my story in November 2002 to the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times and was laughed out the door.
The mainstream media generally supported Bush and Blair’s deceitful agenda and the rest is history. (My articles were published in some US regional newspapers.)
Did anyone follow up on the press story that Steinhoff’s Wiese was stopped at Heathrow airport some time back with a suitcase full of foreign currency?
What was the CEO of a top international company with a high profile in SA doing taking money out of the country in a suitcase? Surely that should have sent a flag up? To my knowledge nothing developed from that story. Was it because Wiese was seen as a business icon who could do no wrong?
GM Graser Pretoria