Could Agrizzi be lying to SA?

ANGELO Agrizzi, the erstwhile chief operations officer of Bosasa, had South Africans hanging on his every word at the commission into state capture this week.

There were several bombshells, but none perhaps as explosive as the claim the company had several – as yet unnamed – journalists on its payroll who would receive monthly payments to keep them from writing negative reports.

It is an immensely damaging allegation at a time when the media is under extreme threat, both precipitating the commission through its investigations and because of the welter of fake news in the public space.

Agrizzi’s claims cannot go unanswered; the stakes are too high for everyone, ordinary South Africans most of all.

But Agrizzi may well have given everyone a very timely gift by overreaching himself when he claimed Bosasa made a R100000 payment towards the legal defence fund of the so-called SABC 8.

If true, it wouldn’t necessarily mean anything since this was a crowd-funded campaign to fight a manifest injustice; it would only serve to muddy the waters.

The South African National Editors Forum met the challenge head-on, checking through its accounts and finding no such proof.

It declared as much as it could and then, when there were people still trying to make capital from the lie, promptly secured the services of an independent auditor to check its findings.

It’s a salutary lesson for all of us – in this era of contestation and the disproportionate influence of the court of public opinion fuelled by social media it is difficult for the truth to emerge or – when it has emerged – to be accepted.

The question we must all ask this weekend is that if Agrizzi could be found out lying on something as simple as a donation to a legal fund, what else has he lied about, but which we accepted at face value?