‘I owe my loyalty to seven million people’

The Mail & Guardian asked SABC staffers for accounts of events there. A senior editorial staffer sent this letter addressed to colleagues. It has been edited for length and clarity.

Dear Friends In former president Thabo Mbeki’s biography, he famously quotes a poem by Langston Hughes on the dream deferred.

I have thought much about this in recent weeks. The SABC is my home. It is where I cut my teeth as a journalist and learned many valuable lessons. It has sent me into danger zones and tough situations, trusting me to know where to tread and to come back with the truth.

But today, the SABC newsroom has itself become a psychological war zone. A minefield of uncertainty. Of threats. Of buried expectations and “directives” that will blow your head off if you disobey them — even if you did not know they were there. Even if you could not believe it, they were there. Because, at the SABC, nothing is on paper.

If you look at the most recent editorial policy circulated earlier this month, it says nothing about not covering violent protests, gives no quota for international content, makes no mention of the requirement that stations play 90% local music. These supposed decisions are circulated to the media and affirmed verbally by [chief operating officer] Hlaudi Motsoeneng, but nothing — nothing — is on paper.

The broadcaster actually argued before the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa that it is censoring content to protect our economic outlook, maintain political stability and keep our international image polished to protect investor confidence.

But the nation that Hlaudi believes he should be building is burning. And the majority of South Africans don’t know why. Seven million people rely exclusively on the SABC to give them that information. We do not trust them to draw their own conclusions from all possible coverage we are able to give them.

You may ask: If it has come to this, why don’t the good journalists just leave? In my case, because of those seven million. They do not deserve Hlaudi. They deserve much better.

Maybe, for some SABC employees, there’s a little bit of Stockholm syndrome in there too. I don’t know.

All I know for certain is that this smells funny, and I’m not going to eat it. I am not going to sit around a table and censor my journalistic thoughts and ideas. I will not sit quietly in national editorial meetings when stories that are of essence to our audience are removed from the diary without any reason given. I will not be part of the crime of defrauding this nation of information in the five weeks we have left before the local elections.

Some SABC veterans will tell you that this too will pass, that things will settle down after the elections.

That’s too late.