Daily Dispatch
How quickly we forget dark past
SOUTH Africa has a dark past. The entire truth may never come out, but the Truth and Reconciliation Commission confirmed what a small minority of news outlets had exposed over the years: State machinery and money was used to spy on, smear, destroy, maim and murder many of the apartheid government’s political opponents.
The apartheid regime was a dirty tricks master. There was a time when we thought the Information Scandal was the height of state-sponsored propaganda sophistry. Some R60-million – a significant amount in the ’70s – was shifted from a secret defence budget for various projects intended to counter the anti-apartheid, anti-government message from the international and some local English newspapers. The plan included bribing international news agencies, and establishing a government-controlled newspaper, The Citizen, to counter the message of the likes of the Rand Daily Mail.
That campaign now seems a distant and silly joke when compared to the size, sophistication, scope and cost to South Africa of the Gupta family’s propaganda machine headed by UK-based PR firm Bell Pottinger.
Not only did they acquire their own multichannel media empire, they have been outed as having used social media in a massive fake news propaganda campaign to undermine those who spoke out against them and those in power who helped them pillage the public purse.
But this example from our past is not the only one that we have chosen to follow.
Prior to 1994, this country’s security agencies were used in the most vicious way against its own citizens. National intelligence was used to spy on political opponents, there were state-sponsored death squads and even a chemical and biological weapons programme which targeted socalled enemies of the state. The state quickly moved from spying, blackmail, propaganda and smear campaigns to justifying the use of lethal force against political adversaries. It was a dark and terrible time.
Our past is the reason we now have a justiciable constitution which is unequivocal in its philosophy of “never again”.
We would not repeat our mistakes of the past. Never again would we allow abuses which led to dehumanisation or oppression. But, how quickly we have forgotten. Once again, our intelligence services are being used to spy and gather information and spread disinformation about those who have challenged President Jacob Zuma and his cronies who seek to steal our public resources and hijack a political agenda aimed at creating a country where we enjoy equality and freedom from discrimination of any sort.
Instead, we have become one of the most unequal societies on earth.
It is not a giant leap to think that the same state machinery will be put to use in even darker ways.
1994 gave us an opportunity to confront our dark past and make a better future. We are squandering that opportunity.
We will be counting the cost for decades to come if we do not put a stop to it. The democracy we enjoy came at the cost of many lives and broken souls.