What went wrong in South Africa after apartheid crumbled
It’s 1993. A year before South Africa’s vital first democratic election.
Small groups of journalists secretly leave South Africa for intensive training workshops at the CBC in Toronto.
You could call them voortrekkers (“those who go ahead”).
They’re pioneers sent by the African National Congress (ANC) and other anti-apartheid political and human rights groups to study the ways of democratic journalism and prepare them to cover the coming election with neither fear nor favour.
Running like a golden thread through every workshop is an emphasis on journalistic ethics and morals. On journalism as public service. Journalism as telling truth to power. Journalism as platform and guardian of the free marketplace of ideas.
Once home, the voortrekkers will attempt the impossible — turn the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) from a state broadcaster serving the apartheid government to a public broadcaster serving the people.
At the time, I’m executive producer of the CBC’s TV journalism training. My job is to design and lead the voortrekkers’ coaching workshops.
While still in Toronto, four of the voortrekkers start a political pressure group, the Public Broadcasting Initiative (PBI), aimed directly at the SABC.
They include John Matisonn, who will go on to produce all SABC Radio’s election coverage.
In my book Storytelling and the Anima Factor, I write of Matisonn: “Rubbing his hands together with religious delight . . . he describes one more in his endless list of wonderful ways to screw the SABC fascists and free the journalists to free the people.”
Now, Matisonn has written God, Spies and Lies, subtitled Finding South Africa’s Future through its Past.
Of SABC’s election coverage, he writes:
“Just as citizens took to voting, reporters from all backgrounds responded to the power of independent journalism, and took pride in being part of their country’s public broadcaster, servants of fellow citizens, not of their rulers. They were part of something larger than themselves.”
International observers rated both the election and SABC’s coverage of it as successful, free and fair. Yet Matisonn abhors South Africa’s past, is fearful of its present and is sadly pessimistic about its immediate future.
God, Spies and Lies is about South African politics, of course. But its focus is mostly on the journalists who cover politics and politicians.
The big news is Matisonn’s charge that the late Tertius Myburgh, the powerful, respected editor of the Sunday Times — the largest Sunday newspaper in the country — was a mole, an apartheid spy.
According to Matisonn, Myburgh killed some of his own reporters’ stories about ruling National Party crimes.
“Myburgh betrayed his staff. He betrayed his profession. Most important of all, he betrayed his readers who were dependent on the media to tell them the truth.”
Matisonn is no admirer of President Jacob Zuma and his wholly owned ANC, either.
His opening paragraph, written long before this week’s tumult over Zuma’s abrupt dismissal of two finance ministers within days, sets the stage:
“(Zuma) has all but morally bankrupted Nelson Mandela’s ruling African National Congress (ANC).
“(His) vision-free leadership, questionable personal behaviour and attempts to use his political power to distort the judicial system render him no better than Italy’s corrupt bunga-bunga partying ex-prime minister, Silvio Ber- lusconi. How far has this great party fallen!”
But what of the SABC today, 21 years after that fair, balanced coverage of the first democratic election? Does it stay a public broadcaster like CBC and BBC? Not exactly. Here’s Matisonn on the SABC: “The door between jobs in the . . . SABC board . . . revolved, (and) entrenched political interference instead of a culture of independence. Conflict … was fanned by loyalties to party structures instead of the institutions that paid their salaries.”
God, Spies and Lies is crammed with South African journalistic history and revelations of political skulduggery.
It should be read by everyone who cares about democracy, freedom of information and modern South Africa: the former rainbow nation.
And it should be read by every journalist needing to understand how easily corrupt, self-serving politicians can poison democracy’s free marketplace of ideas.
Last words are Matisonn’s summation in God, Spies and Lies:
“For a brief, shining moment, we thought we had harnessed history, and perhaps we had. But history is an unruly mount. No sooner had we turned to take in the view than it broke free, galloping in directions we knew not where. A new generation must embrace its challenge. They inherited a constitution that makes it possible. It’s up to them to find the will.”