After five more nightmare years, we need solutions
We are on the edge of the abyss. As our rulers face multiple failures, it is time for South Africa’s people to step up with solutions that could help us to reclaim our future
Afew weeks ago, President Cyril Ramaphosa delivered his plan on how to implement the Zondo Commission’s recommendations and, to echo my colleague Marianne Merten, he is attempting to fix the system itself. Some points are definitely strong and well intentioned.
But every system must rest on its pillars. Not only on departments and political power, but on the people and their decency, competence and commitment.
President Ramaphosa is still, all these years later, not moving on cadre deployment and not moving openly against his ANC colleagues – even as it is clear that the distribution of power and money within the ruling party has created a corruption feeding frenzy and, even more destructively, spread the virus of incompetence that in itself has the greatest potential to bring the whole country down.
Still, the people of South Africa refuse to give up. They have had enough of the incompetence, indecency and selfishness that defines the “leadership” of our country today – political and executive.
Next week in Cape Town, will hold its signature conference, The Gathering 2022, with a special purpose engraved in our payoff line:
South Africa’s top experts from a variety of sectors will gather to offer their knowledge, ideas and goodwill to light the way out of the morass we’re in. They will discuss solutions for: Energy beyond Eskom;
Economy and the business environment; Pandemic preparation;
How to fix the security cluster;
How to deliver to the poorest of the poor; How to fight our common hopelessness, and, finally;
How to transform our political system.
The participants are world-class people who are not looking to score tenders and move up a Game of Thrones-type ladder. They just want to help, given that our government is not exactly brimming with expertise and good faith.
More than anything, they hope to live in a country where hope doesn’t die.
In the spirit of help and assistance that will permeate The Gathering 2022, we at
also have a proposal to make regarding the role media plays in the modern state we would all like to build.
But, before we present our simple, and
short, proposal, a few facts:
The Fourth Estate of South Africa
– the news media – fought valiantly for truth in the days when lies were far more profitable. We stayed true to our mission when cynicism was a safer place to be. We didn’t flinch when threats were hurled at us and didn’t melt when things got hot. We were holding the line we knew could not be abandoned, because our common future was being defended.
I was astonished when President Ramaphosa told gathered media representatives in 2018, soon after his ascension to the presidency, that he and other ANC leaders had become aware of just how badly the wheels had fallen off only after the breaking of the #GuptaLeaks (his choice of metaphor).
It was a clever statement to make in a room full of senior journalists and editors – containing just enough flattery to make them forget how indefensible the decade-long ANC’s appeasement of Jacob Zuma was.
But, logically, only two reasons can possibly explain how the eyes of the majority of the ANC and government were closed so wide shut: blinding incompetence (they see it, even as it was happening right in front of their eyes) or wilful blindness (because they to see it).
I wonder which it was?
Almost five years since we as a country started dealing with State Capture, general corruption, homelessness and poverty are amplified by the spectre of hunger and the rise of openly xenophobic political players.
Large swathes of South Africa are run by parallel structures of organised crime.
State Capture perpetrators, and the new generation of corrupt criminals, are louder than ever. Some of them will even compete for senior positions at the ANC’s December conference. Some of them belong notionally to the opposition, but have been exposed by the media as corrupt and posing a systemic threat to our constitutional order.
In this chaos that is today’s South Africa, there is still a strong point of continuing strength and dedication to truth – the media.
The Zondo Commission report – a product of incredible work by dedicated professionals who truly love this country – has proven that what we’ve been publishing for years was true; that the state was indeed captured and precisely by the people the media fingered a long time ago.
And yet, we in the media are frustrated. Why did we have to lose so much time before even beginning to address the crimes that were long ago proven beyond doubt?
So, in the spirit of we offer a short and practical solution to help remedy this situation.
1. Media reports and investigations need to be taken seriously
We know what we publish is accurate and we check our facts thoroughly. As witnessed hundreds of times, we are overwhelmingly right in our reporting. If we report that someone broke the law, it is very, very likely the law was indeed broken.
Should this point be accepted, the next one, also simple, should follow.
2. Media reports and investigations need to be immediately considered by the investigating and prosecuting authorities.
The iron is cast while it’s hot. Our investigations often contain a wealth of data that could be used immediately or give a clear picture of where that data could be found.
We understand that the NPA and the Hawks are overwhelmed, and have thousands of cases that need to be investigated, and that it will take years and decades to investigate and prosecute them all.
But the South African government also needs to understand that the people of our country need to see justice done.
No one likes slow justice. The Matshela Kokos of the world will end up fighting for many years, possibly decades – Jacob Zuma has shown how it is done.
So, we propose that we all walk and chew gum at the same time.
We propose that, within the NPA and the Hawks, small but dedicated teams of top professionals are created to immediately check media investigations and exposés.
There is no need for these task teams to comprise hundreds of experts: a few dozen energised officers who love their country and understand the “fierce urgency of now” would suffice.
Within a matter of weeks, they will be able to establish if there are grounds for prosecution or not.
This effort would cut the time needed to bring major criminals to book from many years (decades) to a few months.
Now that would be the type of winning that the majority of our brutalised population would appreciate and that could perform wonders for our sagging morale.
We have wasted all these years. There’s so much time to make up. But we must start somewhere.
How about here and now?