From Cradock 4 to SABC 8
Lukhanyo Calata’s legacy
Iam always a ball of nervous energy just before boarding a flight. Strange thing is I don’t really know why. These nerves are there every time, despite my job as a journalist, which requires that I travel by airplane quite regularly. I had decided earlier that week that I wouldn’t rack my brain trying to figure out why Jessie Duarte, the ANC’s deputy secretary-general, had called me to a meeting. This, however, was easier said than done. Until this point, my association with the DSG had been limited to purely professional engagements, mostly at press conferences either in Cape Town or Johannesburg. From those few encounters, I knew she was a no-nonsense kind of lady.
Fortunately, the flight to Johannesburg that Friday morning went by quite smoothly. I chose to wait for my mother and elder sister, Dorothy, outside the terminal buildings at the airport. It had been a while since I had last seen them. My mother still lived in Cradock, although lately she seemed to be spending most of her time travelling between Cape Town, where I live with my family, and Limpopo, where Dorothy lived with her family.
We set off for Luthuli House with me in the back seat. In those few moments, as we drove from the airport, I felt completely unburdened. For the first time in weeks, I could just breathe, relax, and take it easy. I felt so reassured being with them, and I knew that despite all the drama of the last few weeks, my family and I would survive this.
Meeting Jessie Duarte
As we approached the Johannesburg CBD, inching ever closer to 54 Pixley Ka Seme Street, I could sense the mood in the car change. We all grew quiet, until my mom snapped us back to the reality of why the three of us were reunited in Johannesburg. She mentioned how my ordeal had stirred in her a deep-rooted fear for my safety and wellbeing. In the same breath, she was outraged by the situation I found myself in.
It was a very difficult time for her, more so than anyone in the family could have suspected. You see, my mother had over the years done almost everything she could to keep me far removed from active politics. She feared my involvement in politics or activism of any sort would more than likely result in my being killed just like my father.
Yet here I was, her only son, summoned to Luthuli House and her worst fears seemed realised.
My mother was particularly scathing of the circumstances around my dismissal. According to her, the manner in which the SABC had fired me was far too similar to the circumstances surrounding my father’s dismissal from his post as a secondary school teacher, in the months leading up to his assassination. This SABC saga had been a terrible case of déjà vu for her.
Upon our arrival at Luthuli House, the security guard at the entrance to the parking lot said he had been told to expect us, and directed us to where we should park.
We entered the building through the glass door near the parking lot. I informed the courteous lady at reception that we were there to see Jessie Duarte. “The DSG?” she asked. I nodded. “Sixth floor,” she said.
A gentleman named Lungi Mtshali was waiting for us on the sixth floor. I had never given much thought to what the offices at Luthuli House looked like, but once I saw them, I was pleasantly surprised. I wasn’t sure what to make of the gold-flaked wallpaper, but I thought the offices themselves were quite modern. They were well lit, with spacious corridors, and rather busy despite it being a Friday afternoon.
Lungi was waiting for us outside his office about halfway down the corridor. He was a softly spoken guy with a beautiful smile. After the formal introductions, he informed us — much to my mother and sister’s chagrin — that I would meet with the DSG alone at first, before the two of them could join us. I was fine with this. It was after all the reason why I had come, but my mother wasn’t pleased with this arrangement.
Lungi and I made our way through his neatly kept office. As I walked just a few paces behind him, I had a revelation of the significance of this meeting and my presence at Luthuli House. Despite the magnitude of the moment, I tried desperately to keep calm. I needed to be composed when I met Jessie Duarte.
An encounter with Jimi Matthews
Duarte sat behind her desk, about to finish reading a document which I imagined to be a report of some kind. I’d seen her many times before in press conferences, and I’d always found her very stern and strict. Yet, as she took off her glasses and walked across her office to greet me, she had such a warm and friendly smile, which I, of course and very naturally, reciprocated.
I remember being amazed by the fact that she wore takkies to work. I liked that about her. She immediately put me at ease. She’s harmless, I remember thinking — a thought I took back almost immediately when she gave me quite a firm handshake, before inviting me to sit down at a meeting table.
She began by apologising for the situation that my colleagues and I found ourselves in, and explained that she had wanted to meet with me to get my side of the sorry SABC saga. Telling me she found newspaper reports about what was unfolding at the public broadcaster quite contradictory, she said she needed a firsthand account of what was going on. She added that our chat would help her put together a report for a meeting taking place the following Monday.
My plan, or what little of it I had, was to make the most of the opportunity this meeting provided. I didn’t know if I would ever get the chance to speak to an actual decision-maker again, so I began to tell her my story from the very beginning.
For me, it had all started on the evening of February 13 2014, the night of the state of the nation address. This was the last state of the nation address before the general elections in May that year. By then, I had been in the SABC’s employ for three years. Prior to that night, I had not come across anything out of the ordinary for a journalist working in any newsroom.
But around 10 o’clock that evening, an encounter I had with Jimi Matthews, who was then head of news, changed everything.
It was just outside the entrance to the Marks Building in the parliamentary precinct that I had my first-ever instruction to censor the news at the SABC. I demonstrated to Duarte how Jimi had grabbed me by the scruff of my jacket and instructed me not to get him into s**t and to go and cut him positive soundbites of reactions from opposition parties following the president’s address.
My dilemma with this instruction was two-fold. Firstly, there were the obvious censorship issues; and, secondly, there were no positive soundbites to cut. That year, 2014, was an election year. Politicians, particularly those from opposition parties, are shrewd enough to understand the value of those few minutes when we interview them live on air. They know that what they say is broadcast live to the nation. None of them would use those precious minutes to sing the praises of the then president Jacob Zuma. Not one of them had anything remotely positive to say about the president’s address.
I told Duarte how my interaction with Jimi that night had troubled me, not only as a journalist working in a free and democratic South Africa, but also as the son of Fort Calata. It had upset me deeply that I
had been asked to do something that had such strong ties to apartheid South Africa. In the apartheid years, particularly in the turbulent 1980s, the SABC was truly “his master’s voice”, a tool used to great effect by the brutal and murderous regime of PW Botha. How could Jimi of all people dare to ask me to do to my people the exact same things successive apartheid governments had done to them? It was something I was not prepared to do.
Today, I look back at that moment with Jimi and feel so proud of my defiance, particularly for not betraying the dreams and aspirations of all South Africans. I should add that I never did cut those soundbites, or any soundbites for that matter. Instead, I relayed Jimi’s instructions to the parliamentary editor, Vuyani Green. He, too, must have felt uneasy at these instructions, because he asked me to pass the message on to my colleague Bulelani
Phillip, who was working on the reactions piece for the next morning. I refused to do that, too. I then grabbed my jacket, bag and car keys, and bid everyone a good night.
I recounted other, subsequent incidents to Duarte — such as the time I received the instruction that we (TV reporters in parliament) were no longer allowed to use an iconic and historically significant reel of footage, in which members of parliament representing the EFF disrupted a sitting of the National Assembly. Chanting “Pay back the money!”, they would not allow Zuma to address the house, saying he first needed to pay back several millions of rands, as per the findings and recommendations of the public protector at the time, Thuli Madonsela.
To this day, I have no idea who in the SABC had issued the directive that the EFF footage be banned. I remember, though, that I flatly ignored the instruction and continued using the footage to overlay my piece, which looked back at the key moments of the 2014 parliamentary year.
A few minutes after sending the package through to Johannesburg for broadcast that December afternoon, I received a call from Nyana Molete, TV news editor. His first words to me were, “Calata, why do you want me to lose my job?” — a question that greatly puzzled me because I did not wield such or any other power for that matter at the SABC.
He then asked me to re-edit my piece and drop the footage of the EFF MPs chanting “Pay back the money!” I declined. In the ensuing debate about journalistic principles and ethics, he asked me, “Calata, will you feed my children when they have to go to bed hungry?” My response was that, although I would not like his children to go to bed hungry, I was not prepared to re-edit the piece. I claimed to have already left the office by then anyway. He said in that case the re-edit would be done in Johannesburg. I had no response to that, so I ended our telephone conversation.
A colleague who was in the office with me at the time overheard my conversation with Nyana. I suspect it was she who may have leaked my conversation with him to Andisiwe Makinana from City Press. Andisiwe called me barely half an hour later, asking me to confirm whether it was true that the SABC had banned the footage of
EFF MPs chanting “Pay back the money!” in the National Assembly. I confirmed to her that this was indeed the case.
The article appeared the following Sunday. Suffice to say, it didn’t go down well with the managers at the SABC.
About two weeks later, in January 2015, news management, in the person of parliamentary editor Vuyani Green, threatened us with immediate dismissal if we spoke out about internal SABC matters.
Our livelihoods were being threatened because high-ranking individuals in the SABC newsroom had taken unethical and, in some cases, unlawful decisions. Although they were meant to protect us journalists on the ground, they were selling us out.
These two incidents led to several more instances where some of my colleagues and I had to object to other unethical and unlawful instructions. Sometimes these were issued to us in the name of the ANC.
Duarte on several occasions assured me that such instructions were never issued by the ANC and that those behind such actions were doing so of their own volition.
Duarte then asked about our dismissals. I proceeded to describe to her the disciplinary process or lack thereof in detail. I specifically highlighted to her how the SABC had in its haste to fire us flouted its own rules and regulations.
Worse still was that the SABC had not only violated the country’s labour laws in the process, it had in essence violated our constitutional rights. I asked her how this had been allowed to happen in a democratic South Africa under the ANC’s watch.
At this point, I could feel my anger and frustrations of the last few weeks bubbling to the surface. I was getting emotional. I hadn’t realised just how much the events of the recent past had affected me and the toll they had taken.
Duarte was desperately trying to keep up as she took notes of our conversation. At some point, she looked up from her notepad and asked what she and the organisation could do to assist me. I hesitated for a second or two, and responded that we needed help getting our jobs back.
She immediately agreed to help. But there was a problem. She said she would probably only be able to assist Busisiwe Ntuli, Thandeka Gqubule, and me. The three of us were represented by our union, the Broadcasting, Electronic, Media, and Allied Workers Union, in our labour dispute with the SABC.
Duarte said there was little she could do to help my other colleagues, Suna Venter, Foeta Krige, Krivani Pillay and Jacques Steenkamp, as they were represented by Solidariteit, an organisation that represents Afrikaner interests. She said it held ideologically different views to the ANC.
I didn’t understand. And quite frankly, I didn’t want to understand and neither did it matter to me which organisation was representing whom. This had nothing to do with Solidariteit or any other organisation. I respectfully pointed out to her that I didn’t think it would reflect kindly on the ANC if it emerged that it had helped the three black journalists (two of whom, Thandeka and myself, had strong historical ties to the ANC) and not those from other races in the fight against the SABC.
I impressed upon her the fact that eight of us were dismissed and that if she or the ANC was offering us help, they would have to help all eight of us, not just some of us. I was very pleased when she eventually agreed with me.
The parallels
With this now settled and out of the way, we invited my mom and sister into the meeting. I’ve always known that my mother is a mighty soldier of a woman. I thank God every day that He chose her to give birth to me, raise, and guide me on this earth. In the meeting with Duarte, my mother once again proved just what a powerful force she is. She began by telling the DSG how she had read my letter in the newspapers and how she couldn’t understand why I had been dismissed based on what I had written in that letter.
For her, the parallels between my ordeal and that of my father were too much to bear. She then compared the circumstances between my father’s dismissal and mine, pointing out some uncanny similarities. She said that, at the time of my father’s murder, he had been waiting to be reinstated after being fired from his job as a school teacher in Cradock. Like him, I too had been charged and allocated a date upon which I would appear before a disciplinary hearing, and — once again like my father — I had been dismissed without my employer ever hearing my side of the story.
After an emotionally charged two hours for all four of us around that table, the meeting ended with Duarte promising to do all she could to assist the eight of us fired by the SABC.
On Tuesday, July 26 2016, four days after my meeting with Duarte, the Labour Court ruled that four of the SABC 8, Foeta Krige, Suna Venter, Krivani Pillay, and Jacques Steenkamp, be reinstated. This was obviously good news for all of us. The court ruling meant Busi, Thandeka, and I could also return to our posts at the SABC. Our lawyers assured us that the ruling meant we probably wouldn’t appear in court.
The SABC management, however, cut our celebrations and congratulatory messages short. Barely an hour after the court ruling, management announced they would appeal the Labour Court’s decision that we be reinstated.
Just like that, our jubilation turned to despair. We asked ourselves how the SABC with its depleting cash reserves could waste taxpayers’ money on a trivial matter like this. Thandeka, Busi, and I were due in court for our case on Thursday July 28. We instructed Nick, our lawyer, to prepare to give the SABC a bloody nose. I was baying for it. On Wednesday July 27, the SABC suddenly backed down from its threats, announced it would not appeal the Labour Court ruling, and that we were free to return to our posts the very next day. This was such welcome news for all of us.
I suspected that this sudden about-turn may have had something to do with my meeting with Duarte, but I wasn’t sure how much of it did, and I never called to confirm if Duarte or the ANC had anything to do with the SABC’s decision to let us return to work.
It was in the parliamentary precinct that I had my first-ever instruction to censor the news at the SABC