Mbeki vs The Press

South Africa got its political freedom at the time when the era of ideologies came to an end, ushering the politics of personalities and fear. The ANC profited well from the charisma and statue of Nelson Mandela but his departure from the political scene drove it into politics of fear.

Politics of fear are something almost all political parties of significance in South Africa rely on. The DA was built on the foundations of ‘fighting back’ strategies and fear of turning South Africa into another corrupt African State. The fear ANC relies on is that of things going back to the realities of apartheid era. Its current talk of ‘The enemy manoeuvres but it remains the enemy’ trying to offset the gains of ‘National Democratic Revolution’ make the point clear.

To complicate issues in our nascent democracy, there’s has been a rise in careless prattle and untrained clump of words that are the usual consequent of dynamics of free press, which is lifting the lids off the immature ANC government. Instead of taking this trumpeting manifesto as occupational necessity of a free democratic country the ruling party wants to compete with it.

Mallarmé once ironically explained his poem, La nuit approbatrice, to his friend Henri Cazalis by saying; ‘If you murmur it yourself a couple of times, you get a fairly cabbalistic sensation.’ Mostly what the press murmurs gives it cabbalistic sensation they believe to be the splendour of truth.

Unfortunately the cabbalistic sensation has rubbed off into the ruling party, as demonstrated by statements like; ‘Our historical opponents have the task to convince the nation that under our leadership, the democratic revolution has failed. The revolutionary duty of the ANC is not only further to accelerate the process of social transformation, but also to conduct the political and ideological struggle to ensure the cohesion of the masses of our people as a united force engaged in the long march towards the creation of a truly non-racial, non-sexist and prosperous democracy.’ [ANC Today; Volume 7, No. 34 • 31 August—6 September 2007; A silent mood of trepidation?] Talk about wearing the mantle of your purported enemy.

R.S. Roberts’ competent book, ‘Fit to Govern: The Native Intelligence of Thabo Mbeki’ is a clear example of what happens when one allows the need to address the platitudinous tendencies of the media distract you. The book reads more as if its purpose was to prove the impotent shallowness of our media commentators. Even when you achieve this goal, as Roberts has, the victory is pyrrhic. Taking the media too seriously when it violates modesty by heaping spleen and cultivating hysteria against is like squaring circles. It is self-defeating and dancing to their drums.

Impression is a survival skill to the media, more valuable than reflection. It is in the nature of the media to leech in order to inject vitality on its content. Press freedom has, world over, been raised into a political creed. That’s what is meant by the Fourth Estate. The sooner the ANC government realises this the more it’d be better structured to exploit, rather than fight it.

Although political parties are still electoral machines—mostly out of inertia—the times have changed. Political parties have ceased to be issuers of alternative ideas as can be seen by writers and thinkers throwing their lot with broadcasting networks that have acquired industrial and commercial life. In short, money has become the only sinew in the war of airwaves. Hence instead of ideas has come the struggle of images and personalities, the battles of the scoop and the soundbites.

The only way political parties will survive here is by aligning themselves, for tactical reasons, with media communication. That’s what the aesthetically assertive leader of DA, Helen Zille, with her look-at-me style of politics, has learnt very well to do. Instead of huffing and puffing about she milks it, beating the tom-toms of publicity to her advantage.

The press is not only an industry, but now an industry first and foremost. Political journals, like ANC Today, might serve as internal organs for intellectual power struggles, but to capture the attention of the vox populli you need media. Media form bridge between the theory of the vanguard and the spontaneous movement of the class, in Lenin’s idiom.

The ANC needs to stop retreating to bellicose politics and placidly put out into the world why millions keep voting it into government election after election. Despite what the self-appointed fundi of our political scene say about the nostalgia and ignorance of masses who keep voting for the ANC, people know exactly which side their bread is buttered. It is the failure of the ANC technique that it has not translated its democratic legitimacy into sound publicity strategies.

The lesson we all need to relearn, as the bickering starts to show some serious personal misfiring, is that that politics is essentially about maintaining social stability. Transformation is a necessary step for furthering our freedom but none of us have anything to gain from the state of anarchy. It might be that every anarchic situation is the herald of a renaissance, but there are no guarantees, and the price to higher to pay. The gods of apartheid who fled through the front door of our democracy are starting to come back through the backdoor and the windows. It is time to take caution.

Drawing their authority from the sun, like Egyptian Pharoahs, some in the media have lately been at pains trying to convince us that things in our country are falling apart. Most of us do not believe the bagarre in the Tripartite Alliance (ANC, COSATU & SACP) leading to Polokwane means anything more than proper differentiation within the alliance. They’re encouraging signs of democratic change happening, and the necessary beginnings for severance of artificial coalitions that have outlived their usefulness.

We all need to be done with our irrational anger, dishonest evasiveness and greedy opportunism, and admit some few truths to ourselves with the humility they deserve. Like the fact that we are a country emerging from a wounding past, bankrupt of ideas to take us into a non-racial and multicultural future we want to be; instead of trying to be poor ersatz of other systems and countries.

Our media needs to learn sensitivity to complex issues, whose value is to be found in its receptiveness and proper understanding of our past experience. The government, especially our president, needs to open up more, learn not to be emotional against the criticism of their policies and failures; because this is how the country will establish its own reflective consciousness. Only then will we be done of these cabbalistic sensations.No one is saying the battle for hegemony should also sieze.