A government that wants to control the way its citizens think is a government facing failure. With the SABC, it’s always been like that.
One evening in 1978 or 79, I was working at SABC TV News as the duty reporter on the evening shift. The eight p.m. news had just started, read by one of the legends – Michael de Morgan or perhaps Adrian Steed. The phone rang on the News Editor’s desk. My job was to answer any phone in the newsroom so I picked it up. On the other end was then-Foreign Minister, Pik Botha, breathing fire at something just broadcast and demanding to be put through to the News Editor in the on-air studio.
I explained that I couldn’t do that, as the news bulletin was live at that very moment. Pik’s rage increased exponentially, as did the number of words in his sentences beginning with ‘F’. Realising that this was way above my pay grade, I transferred him to ‘the box’, as we called it, and left it to far more senior people to handle.
This was a key official of the outcast apartheid government controlling news content and influencing the way ordinary South Africans – white South Africans, of course, in those days – received information. Pik Botha was clearly taking strain.
Fast forward to 1984-85, when the UDF had set the townships alight, literally and metaphorically. I’d left the SABC several years earlier and was working for the young Radio 702, and also stringing for ABC Radio News in New York. My mornings were spent at 702’s offices in Johannesburg’s Eloff Street, my afternoons in places like Soweto, Daveyton and Sebokeng.
At that stage, my wife and I lived in Brixton, not far from Coronationville, where, on one particular day, trouble had flared. I arrived home to find my wife, largely unperturbed, but wondering about ‘those popping noises’ that she could hear. I explained to her that police were shooting demonstrators in Coronationville and she was listening to the distinctive crack of R4 rifles.
At first, she refused to believe me. Police would never do that, she said emphatically, even though I had told her about many previous such incidents. What’s more, she added, if something like that had actually been happening, she’d have seen it on SABC TV News. It wasn’t on the news, so it wasn’t happening.
In that way, she was typical of most white South Africans – prevented by government thought control from knowing the truth. This was just before P.W. Botha’s infamous Rubicon speech. The very foundations of apartheid’s edifice were crumbling; the greater the pressure, the more the SABC was clamping down on information. The ruling National Party had commissars in key positions in the news structures to ensure that nothing untoward slipped through – men like Heads of News, Jan van Zyl and Kobus Hamman, along with TV News chief, Sakkie Burger, brother of infamous Brixton Murder and Robbery Squad boss, ‘Staal’ Burger. You crossed these men at your peril.
Which brings me to the modern-day SABC and its equally infamous Chief Operating Officer, Hlaudi Motsoeneng. He’s just been accused of all manner of sins by Public Protector, Thuli Madonsela, including lying about qualifications, purging opponents and wasting funds. Observers suggest he’s been allowed to get away with this for so long because he toes the ANC party line – just as his Nat predecessors did.
In this area – thought control, also known as propaganda – the similarities between the old government and the new are striking: a belief that ‘their story’ is not being told accurately; dark mutterings about ‘foreign forces’; a need to ‘talk up the good news’; specious waffle about ‘the role of the SABC in our nation’; blatant lies and distortion.
So it’s going to be interesting, in the light of the Public Protector’s findings, to see how government deals with the Motsoeneng issue. And yes, this is a government decision that will be handed by Cabinet to the supine SABC Board for implementation.
Remembering the Nats, and having watched many other totalitarian regimes, it’s fair to say that the deeper the crisis, the tighter the control over state media. So, if Motsoeneng is fired – as he should have been within hours of the release of Madonsela’s report – I think we may assume that the country is not in as much trouble as some commentators suggest.
But if he gets away with it and somehow keeps his job, we’re very much closer to the dark days of 1984-85 than I had feared.