Media control is an ominous sign for the future of our democracy

EARS ago, as a junior reporter for the then Herald newspaper in Zimbabwe, one of my daily assignments was at the Harare Magistrate’s Court. My colleague, Des Parker, and I would regularly join the prosecutors at around 11am for tea.

One day, on one of the tables in the tea room, was a ream of freshly printed and brightly coloured pamphlets… from the North Korean government which, it later turned out, was to play a major role in supporting Robert Mugabe. The pamphlets were decorated with very pretty oriental scenery and symbols: snow-covered mountains, trees, flying birds, pretty flowers, sparkling streams.

And each pamphlet (which was about four pages) was, in its entirety, a poem to the “Great Leader”, Kim Il-sung. If you can call this sort of thing a poem: Ki, Il-sung is a bird, Ki, Il-sung is a flower, Ki, Il-sung is the wind, Ki, Il- sung is the sun, Ki, Il-sung is the moon, Ki, Il-sung is a lion… etc etc etc. Virtually every imaginable creature was Kim Il-sung, as were most of the major natural phenomena.

To cynical young hacks, the temptation was too great: we grabbed our pens and on about half a dozen of them scribbled things like “Ki, Il-sung wears pink panties…”

The pamphlets disappeared the next day and there was a move to ban the revanchist capitalist running dog reporters from the tea room (nothing came of that, fortunately…)

YRobert Mugabe, who so admired the “Juche Revolution” of Kim Il-sung, started his own little cult of personality and Des and I were dismayed to see that our newspaper – bought out by the government from the SA Argus group – was in the vanguard of the promotion of Mugabe. After I left The Herald, I remember going through a copy of the paper and counting at least 30 references to “Comrade Mugabe” and at least a dozen photographs of him dotted throughout the paper.

It didn’t take ordinary Zimbabweans long to realise that the Herald was nothing more than their new master’s voice (and even Ian Smith couldn’t control The Herald in the bad old days). When the Bulawayo Chronicle, under editor Geoff Nyarota, began exposing government corruption in the late 1980s, his sales boomed while The Herald’s plummeted.

Sadly, for Geoff, he was fired because his paper was also government-owned. But the episode did help spawn an independent and vibrant free press in Zimbabwe.

There have been ominous signs of late of the Stalinist/north Korean cult of personality – and its attendant iron-fisted control of information flow – in our own country.

The ANC government wants to crack down on newspapers – the Mail & Guardian, the Sunday Times and the newspapers of the Independent group (which publishes the Saturday Star). It also wants to classify as secret a huge range of information.

The SABC has fawningly begun regularly using Jacob Zuma’s middle name, Gedleyihlekisa, and has also referred to him as “His Excellency” on TV captions running over his speeches.

Then, this week, The New Age (TNA) newspaper – established by the Gupta family (who are close to Zuma) to bring some “balance” to media reporting in SA – ran a similarly fawning feature on Zuma’s State of the Nation address in Parliament.

The first page of the spread featured a strap line indicating that the piece had been “Brought to you by the Government Communication and Information Service (GCIS)”. Nothing wrong with that – governments may spend money on advertorial. The problem was that the editorial content was clearly from The New Age. Conclusion: TNA equals GCIS.

If genuine, free newspapers are silenced or controlled, this could be your future.

And one day, you too, might end up reading a pamphlet …Jacob Zuma is a bird, Jacob Zuma is the wind, Jacob Zuma is the sun…