7.
The Sunday Times versus the health minister
True universalists are not those who preach global tolerance of differences and all-encompassing unity, but those who engage in a passionate fight for the assertion of the Truth that enthuses them.1
The aim of this chapter is to develop, through an analysis of the conflict in 2007 between the Sunday Times and the then minister of health, Dr Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, a new theoretical perspective on the relationships between three different kinds of subjects and subjections. The discussion is about the loyal subject (Tshabalala-Msimang); the questioning subject (the deputy health minister, Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge) who was fired for not toeing the ideological line; and the Sunday Times newspaper.
‘Subjectivisation’ or subjection refers to the ANC-led government’s attempt to force the Sunday Times to its unitary view. This case study will show how the relationships between government and media over the two subjects unfolded during 2007; how the unfolding events highlight the way ideology works in trying to create unity in a divided society; how there is an excess attached to the media through its label ‘enemy of the people’, lacking in ubuntu;2 and finally how the attempted subjection of the Sunday Times failed, signalling a hopeful moment for democracy. Reflecting on the Žižek quote above, the case study also discusses how the media and the government dealt with their differences over the ‘truth’ in two stories in the Sunday Times: ‘Manto’s hospital booze binge’ (12 August 2007) and ‘Manto: A drunk and a thief ’ (19 August 2007). The chapter explores how, on the one hand, ubuntu was used by the ANC to try and rein in journalists and, on the other, how journalists believed that they were engaged in a passionate fight for the truth, holding those in power to account for their behaviour and actions, while serving their profession and democracy. However, one must not forget that newspapers like sexy or juicy stories too, and this certainly was one.
While there was resistance to the ideological interpellation, or labelling, of Sunday Times journalists as ‘enemies of the people’, there was also ambivalence: half turns were made towards the interpellating voices. I have developed the concept ‘half turn’ from Butler’s conceptualisation of the reflexive turn, which she developed from Althusser’s concept of ‘the turn’ towards the interpellating voice of power (1997: 107-130).
The Sunday Times versus the minister of health: the events
In July 2007, an Eastern Cape newspaper the Daily Dispatch (owned by the company Avusa and in the same stable as the Sunday Times) began a series of reportage exposing an appalling set of conditions in the maternity wards at the Mount Frere hospital. Some of the front-page headlines included: ‘Why Frere’s babies die’ (12 July 2007) and ‘A mother’s pain’ (13 July 2007). The deputy minister of health, and women’s rights’ activist, Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, also a member of the ANC and the SACP, was coincidentally in the Eastern Cape at the time of the news reports, for a conference. She made a spontaneous visit to Mount Frere hospital after reading the reports that newborn babies had died there owing to a lack of care and resources, and the next day she suggested that the situation was tantamount to a ‘national emergency’. The report from the hospital showed that there was a dire shortage of medical equipment as well as clinical and support staff, inadequate infection control and a lack of management action on baby deaths. The ANC then placed an advertisement in a newspaper at a cost of R45 000, asserting that the media reports were a distortion of the facts, after the minister of health, Tshabalala-Msimang, herself visited the hospital on 22 July and found everything to be ‘in order’. She duly declared that the Daily Dispatch reports were unfounded and that her deputy minister’s comments were based on untruths (Mail & Guardian: 27 July-2 August 2007). Not only were the reports about conditions in the hospital construed as ‘media lies’, but Madlala-Routledge was fired on 7 August. The stated reason for her firing, according to President Mbeki, was that she was ‘not able to work as part of a collective’ (Business Day: 27 August 2007). Madlala-Routledge told reporters that she was fired for ‘speaking out’ and cited ‘common denialism’ as a key factor in explaining why Tshabalala-Msimang remained in the cabinet (Sunday Times: 2 September 2007). By ‘common denialism’, Madlala-Routledge meant Mbeki’s AIDS denialism (that HIV did not cause AIDS), which was also echoed by the health minister. Mark Gevisser, author of Mbeki’s unofficial biography, argued that this echoing was due to Tshabalala-Msimang’s loyalty to Mbeki and her fervent belief in his position on AIDS (2007: 758). The journalist, Paddy Harper, agreed with Gevisser and quoted the political analyst Protas Madlala (no relation to Madlala-Routledge) who wrote, ‘on HIV/AIDS the president dreams and Manto implements … the common denialism is a very strong factor – they share this vision and she is very faithful to him and that is why she is getting this level of protection’(Sunday Times: 2 September 2007).
The reality was that the more people criticised the president’s favourite appointees, ‘the more he digs in his heels’, Harper wrote, and, ‘if you are a favoured appointee and in his good books, irrespective of how badly you mess up in your ministry, he will not remove you’ (Sunday Times: 2 September 2007). It is worth taking a small digression to clarify what, in my view, was the central issue in Mbeki’s denialist position on HIV/AIDS in order to understand the tension that arose after the Sunday Times exposé of the health minister, which led to the threat of arrest of the editor and his managing editor, and a threat by the then minister in the office of the presidency, Essop Pahad, to withdraw government advertising in the Sunday Times (Mail & Guardian: 7-13 September 2007). The denialist position on HIV/AIDS is encapsulated by Mbeki’s now infamous comment in parliament in 2000: ‘You see, if you ask the question does HIV cause AIDS … the question is, does a virus cause a syndrome? How does a virus cause a syndrome? It can’t.’ (Health-e: 1 December 2009). He then called antiretrovirals, the treatment for HIV/AIDS sufferers, ‘toxic’.
Thabo Mbeki: HIV/AIDS and race
And thus does it happen that others who consider themselves to be our leaders take to the streets carrying their placards, to demand that because we are germ carriers, and human beings of a lower order that cannot subject its passions to reason, we must perforce adopt strange opinions, to save a depraved and diseased people from perishing from self-inflicted disease … Convinced that we are but natural-born, promiscuous carriers of germs, unique in the world, they proclaim that our continent is doomed to an inevitable mortal end because of our unconquerable devotion to the sin of lust (Mbeki 2001, quoted in Daniels 2006).
In the above extract we see how Mbeki’s discourse constitutes excess of meaning in relation to the concept of Africa, and of Africans, as lustful sinners. If you were to subtract the excess you would lose the enjoyment, in Lacanian theory. Enjoyment is attached to the surplus – in other words the added on, the extra, the unnecessary – (how necessary is it, for instance, for Mbeki to say that whites regard blacks as lustful sinners?). There is enjoyment but also pain and suffering. No other excerpt from the South African public discourse could be more apposite an example of how Mbeki himself was subject to his own social fantasy and Mbeki’s words were the gaze from the outside that showed his own prejudices, and hysteria. The excerpt exposes what Žižek calls ‘surplus enjoyment’ (Žižek, 1989: 52-53). It is full of jouissance, the kind of pleasure that in Lacan is always sexualised. In other words, it is more than enjoyment, always transgressive, pain and suffering, at the limits of what subjects can talk about in public. In the way Mbeki speaks about AIDS one can see that for him both the excess and the enjoyment are coupled with the feeling of suffering and persecution, a kind of perverse schadenfreude, which is altogether too much to bear. Mbeki’s stance on HIV/AIDS tied it to colonialism and poverty, and to race, the Master-Signifier, and had far-reaching implications for how he dealt with the pandemic in political and policy terms. Since 1999, HIV/AIDS had become one of the most politicised and racially-charged issues in the country, and a discourse rooted in his passionate attachment to the signifier ‘race’. Rather than accepting the growing scientific evidence that HIV – emanating from the risky sexual behaviour of multiple concurrent partnerships – caused AIDS, he resorted to diatribes against prevailing views and to acceptance of dissident interpretations.
The Medical Research Council of South Africa and Statistics South Africa estimated that in 2005 over five million people in the country already had HIV or AIDS, while there were about 1 000 new infections daily, and about 600 people died of diseases caused by the virus every day (The Sunday Independent: 30 October 2005). The same article in the Sunday Independent reported that in 2005 the UN secretary general’s special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, Stephen Lewis, said that an estimated six million people were infected with the virus in South Africa, the highest proportion of any population in the world. In view of these statistics and the fact that Mbeki’s former spokesperson Parks Mankahlana had almost certainly died of an AIDS-related illness in mid-2000, it was perplexing that Mbeki stated in a Washington Post interview in September 2003 that he personally did not know anybody who had died of AIDS. An investigation of the government’s policy on HIV/AIDS showed how the issue had been characterised from inception by denial, ambiguity, a conflation of issues and prevarication. When Mbeki took the political centre stage in 1999, however, the issue also became racially charged.
In contextualising the politics of HIV/AIDS, Tim Quinlan and Samantha Willan (2005: 228) wrote that the professional staff of many ministries had given due consideration to the challenges facing the government, and that the national executive had this knowledge. However, they argued, the ‘ambiguities and ambivalence on HIV/AIDS in major policy speeches of the president, as well as statements by the minister of health, indicated a lack of decisiveness about how to use that knowledge’. In 2009, after a change in leadership in the ANC, the official policy that antiretroviral drugs should be rolled out in all provinces began to be implemented with greater seriousness. Manto Tshabalala-Msimang was moved from her position as minister of health and sidelined to a relatively powerless administrative and management position in the office of the new president, Jacob Zuma.
Lacking in ubuntu
A month after the conditions at Mount Frere Hospital were exposed in the Daily Dispatch, the Sunday Times of 12 August 2007 ran a story under the headline ‘Manto’s hospital booze binge’ about the alcohol abuse and tantrums of the health minister which took place in 2005 at the Cape Medi Clinic. The article said that red wine and whiskey were smuggled into her room before she underwent surgery, and that she had dispatched hospital staff to buy her food and alcohol. Then, on 19 August, the newspaper ran an ‘exclusive’ front-page story, whose headline read: ‘MANTO: A DRUNK AND A THIEF – Exclusive: Shocking new revelations about the health minister’ by senior investigative journalists Jocelyn Maker, Megan Power, Charles Molele and Buddy Naidu.
The story created uproar within the government. It stirred heated – and even vitriolic – debate within the journalist profession about whether publishing it was in the public interest, or whether it was just sensational vindictiveness and anti-ubuntu. It raised discussion about whether the publication of the investigation constituted freedom of expression in which the independent press was merely performing its duties to have public figures account for their actions, or whether it was an invasion of rights to privacy and lacking in respect. Finally, it led to the threatened arrest of the editor of the Sunday Times, Mondli Makhanya, and his managing editor, also senior investigator, Jocelyn Maker, for the theft of medical records from the Cape Medi-Clinic. Within weeks of both stories, some politicians and businessmen close to Mbeki formed a company, Koni Media, and made a R7 billion buyout bid for the Sunday Times. Some extracts from the newspaper:
Manto: A drunk and a thief
Health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang had alcoholic liver disease caused by years of excessive drinking when she had a transplant this year. Today the Sunday Times exposes a cover-up around the transplant by medical staff to hide her true condition — alcoholic liver cirrhosis — a disease synonymous with chronic alcoholism. The minister, despite getting the gift of life donated to her by a teenage suicide victim, is still drinking — damaging her new liver. And, in another explosive revelation, the paper can reveal that Tshabalala-Msimang was convicted of theft when she was a medical superintendent at the Athlone Hospital in Botswana in the mid 1970s. Hospital staff became suspicious as for months watches, jewellery, hats, handbags and even shoes were being stolen from patients. She was found guilty in the Lobatse Magistrate’s Court of stealing a patient’s watch, hospital blankets, linen, and heaters, and was declared a ‘prohibited immigrant’.
On March 14 this year, just days after her controversial transplant at the Donald Gordon Medi-Clinic in Johannesburg, the minister’s medical team stated publicly that their patient’s liver had been damaged by autoimmune hepatitis – a long-term disease in which the body’s immune system attacks liver cells. What they failed to tell the public was that the custodian of the country’s health system was an alcoholic, which was why she needed a new liver. The Sunday Times has established that: Pressure was put on medical staff to keep secret her true condition. […] The transplant and subsequent cover-up caused tension among doctors and staff involved in the minister’s care who knew that Tshabalala-Msimang had been drinking before the procedure. Standard transplant criteria dictate that alcoholic patients stop drinking for between six and twelve months before surgery and permanently after surgery to protect the liver. Patients who do not comply are barred from transplant programmes. Experts said Tshabalala-Msimang only got the liver because she was the minister of health. Had it been any other patient in her condition they would not have qualified for the transplant and would have died. But witnesses have since come forward saying they’ve seen the minister drinking on numerous occasions since the transplant. In July she drank wine on a Sunday night flight from Durban to Johannesburg while she sat in business class. And in May, at a Pretoria birthday party she was drunk after drinking red wine. Just this week she was again seen drinking whisky. Medical experts, who refused to be named for fear of victimisation, said there had been other more deserving recipients on the liver transplant waiting list. They claimed that, given the circumstances, the allocation of a scarce donor liver to the Minister was inappropriate.
In Lobatse this week, a retired nurse, who gave evidence at Tshabalala-Msimang’s theft trial, said she was found out after wearing a stolen patient’s watch to work three weeks after it was reported missing. She said police later found other stolen items during a search at Tshabalala-Msimang’s home. Contacted for comment on Friday, Gaborone High Court Judge Ian Kirby, who was Tshabalala-Msimang’s lawyer at the time, confirmed he had represented her. […]Other retired nurses and hospital staff also confirmed the incident. Current medical superintendent Dr M. Hirui refused to comment but an employee said Tshabalala-Msimang’s antics were common knowledge among staff. ‘Everyone here thinks it’s hilarious that she is today a health minister in South Africa,’ he said. These new revelations are part of a five-month investigation and come within a week of a Sunday Times exposé into how booze was smuggled into her hospital room at the Cape Town Medi-Clinic in 2005. She was hospitalised for a shoulder operation performed by Dr Joe de Beer.
Staff at the clinic labelled her behaviour as ‘appalling’ and that she ‘knew she had the power and misused it’. She also demanded food from Woolworths and lemons during the early hours of the morning. Hospital staff were dispatched to buy alcohol on a number of occasions by her bodyguards, a female friend and a senior staff member. Witnesses said the minister was drunk on a number of occasions. Today we can further reveal that in 2005 a hospital in Cape Town refused her entry for a shoulder operation because of her security demands. It was after this refusal that she was admitted to the Cape Town Medi-Clinic in Hof Street. Here, too, she insisted that all operations be cancelled on the Wednesday when was she was due to have her shoulder operation … A 27-year old man, who was a patient just a room away from Tshabalala-Msimang, said on the Friday she was admitted he heard her ‘screaming and shouting’ at nurses. He said he also heard her ordering food and wine from Woolworths … ‘I thought at the time she must have been a psychiatric patient. Her treatment of the nursing staff was shocking. It was only later that night when a nurse came to take my blood pressure when I found out that it was actually the Minister of Health.’
(Sunday Times: 19 August 2007).
It was undisputed by the health minister herself that she was fond of alcohol, even after it was contra-indicated for her condition, cirrhosis of the liver. From the report it seems that she had been abusive to hospital staff – and that she was hopelessly lacking in judgement, having stolen a watch from a patient who was under anaesthetic, nogal. The reaction of the government was to launch a high-powered hunt for the person or persons who had broken the law by leaking copies of Tshabalala-Msimang’s medical records. The then minister in the office of the president, Essop Pahad, condemned the story on the health minister as an outrageous invasion of privacy and threatened the withdrawal of government advertising from the Sunday Times. Mbeki wrote in his public offering, Letter from the President: ‘Who are our heroes and heroines?’:
Some in our country and others elsewhere in the world, including the media, have acclaimed Ms Madlala-Routledge as a great heroine, before and after her dismissal on the basis that she seemed to demonstrate intellectual and personal ‘courage’ by defying the obligation to speak and act as part of a collective. In this regard, in her 10 August press conference … she made a point of emphasising her obligation to be accountable to the media … while the ANC serves as government … it will ensure that its members respect the principle and practice of collective responsibility. Time will tell what happened that gave the Sunday Times the right to tell the story it told, whether right or wrong, about what might have happened in our Minister Tshabalala-Msimang’s private space in hospital. All of us, up to now, assumed that we had a constitutional and common sense entitlement to treat this ‘hospital space’ as being subject to the ‘privacy and dignity’ human right and privilege to which our citizens, including ministers, are constitutionally entitled (ANC Today: 18-23 August 2007).
The essence of the above letter was that Madlala-Routledge was far from a heroine. For Mbeki, Tshabalala-Msimang was the heroine (after all, her dignity and privacy had been violated, and she was a loyal subject). It is obvious that it did not suit Mbeki to have a questioning subject as his deputy health minister. His talk of ‘collective responsibility’ meant that he desired ideological unity, which had served him well with the health minister. His defence of Tshabalala-Msimang was based on what he called her constitutional right to privacy and dignity. The whole discussion, however, masked other issues: that conditions at Mount Frere hospital were shocking, and that this was under the watch of a health minister who toed the president’s rather obstreperous and peculiar line that HIV did not cause AIDS. The scandal of Tshabalala-Msimang’s earlier history was something of a digression, but Mbeki’s was a false argument, an obfuscation of the real issues about the inability of the health department to manage deteriorating conditions in hospitals and a health minister found through the media’s exposure to be unfit for office.
Mbeki, though, sought unquestioning loyalty from his cabinet, and the independent action of Madlala-Routledge led to her sacking. Mbeki saw her speaking out as an implicit criticism that went against the grain of cabinet loyalty. They had to be loyal team players to survive office. In essence, his ministers were his subjects par excellence and were not allowed to exercise their own judgments on any issue, whether appalling conditions at a public hospital or the crisis of HIV/AIDS.3 Madlala-Routledge discovered this at great personal cost and lost her job. By declaring that the conditions at Mount Frere Hospital were tantamount to a ‘national emergency’, she played the role not just of a questioning subject but also of a defiant subject and by firing her Mbeki hoped to enforce hegemonic unity within the ANC by asserting his authority. Ironically, his actions set off a train of events that even alienated members of his own party, and the outcome was that the discourse of opposition in civil society grew, particularly when the press became subject to state vilification, harassment and even potential criminalisation.
Threatened arrest of the Sunday Times editor and his senior investigative reporter
On 14 October 2007 the Sunday Times lead story was ‘Editor, journalist to be arrested’. Maker and Makhanya faced arrest for the illegal possession of medical records of the health minister, related to the story of 12 August 2007 about Tshablala-Msimang’s stay at the Cape Medi-Clinic when she ‘dispatched staff to buy her alcohol, threw drunken tantrums, abused nurses and washed down medication with wine and whiskey’ according to the newspaper report (Sunday Times: 12 August 2007). The charges were related to contravention of Section 14 of the National Health Act (no 63 of 2003), which made it an offence to gain access to personal medical records and to publish them. It must be noted that the story about the health minister’s behaviour at the Medi-Clinic did not reveal many specific details from her medical records, save that she had a serious liver condition yet was consuming alcohol. The story raised the question of whether she was fit to hold the office of health minister.
On 16 August 2007, Tshabalala-Msimang’s legal team lodged an urgent application in the Johannesburg High Court to compel the Sunday Times to return copies of the minister’s health records to the Cape Town Medi-Clinic. Judge Mohamed Jajbhay ruled that the Sunday Times hand over copies of the medical records to the Medi-Clinic and pay the minister’s legal costs. He also commented that there was a pressing need for the public to be informed, that the story was in the public interest, and that personal notes taken by journalists were not affected (Sunday Times: 2 September 2007) and thus freed the newspaper to write further on the matter of the health minister’s fitness for office. The judge, however, also warned journalists to be cautious about using information that was tainted by criminal activity. The Sunday Times and Sanef claimed the judgment as a victory for freedom of the press, while the government claimed it as their victory: records had to be handed back to the Medi-Clinic, and the court ordered the Sunday Times to pay the legal fees. The judgement also criticised the Sunday Times for not affording the health minister enough time to respond to the allegations in the story (Mail & Guardian: 31 August-6 September 2007). It was clearly not an outright victory for either side: the judge gave with one hand, and took with the other. Indeed, not all media commentators found the judgement a victory for freedom of expression at all.
In my argument this saga exemplified the ‘shoot the messenger’ phenomenon. Both stories, the former health minister’s drunken behaviour at the Cape Medi-Clinic and the later story about her being a drunk and a thief, were in the public interest – she was, after all, the health minister and this behaviour made her unfit for office. The fact that the Sunday Times had to pay the health minister’s legal fees could not possibly constitute a victory for freedom of expression – it was punitive in legal terms, and in terms of the political philosophy of this book it was an attempt at subjection which aimed to create unity in society. Creating unity via social consensus constituted an unprogressive form of hegemony as it forecloses spaces for the uncovering of ‘truths’, or exposing abuse of power, and therefore curtails the space of a free media. After the stories were published, journalists at the Sunday Times and those who supported the newspaper’s decision to run with the exposure were hailed as enemies of the people who lacked ubuntu.
The objective of this labelling, according to Butler’s theories of power and subjection, was to bring the subject into line. The making of a subject was also not just about external power pressing upon a subject but was also about a subject making a reflexive turn, or a turn against him or herself. Throughout the Tshabalala-Msimang saga the media was labelled as enemy, supportive of Western, rather than African, notions of press freedom. How it responded to the attempted subjection and what this meant for the media’s relationship to democracy, led to the question: was there resilience, resistance and agency; or a succumbing to the ideological interpellation; or ambivalence in its response? In the Sunday Times article of 14 October 2007, ‘Editor, Journalist to be arrested’, it was reported that Makhanya and Maker’s phones were being tapped and intelligence operatives were trying to dig up dirt on them (Sunday Times: 14 October 2007). Then, the next day, Makhanya announced through his lawyer, Eric van den Berg, that he and Maker would hand themselves over to the police instead of waiting to be arrested. They would do this so that the matter could be dealt with as quickly as possible (Business Day: 15 October 2007). Makhanya had nothing to hide, so why was he then offering to make the police’s work easier? This turn could be called a reflexive turn, and showing ambivalence.
The media: enemies of the people who have no ubuntu
The events brought to the fore contentions and contestations among journalists themselves, with some averring that the Sunday Times had gone beyond the realms of acceptable press freedom. It created debate about a Eurocentric and western mindset within journalism. For example, Thami Mazwai, a veteran journalist on economic affairs at the Sowetan and later head of Mafube, which published Enterprise magazine, in an article written a year after these events entitled ‘What culture is press freedom?’asked whether, if the media must enjoy its constitutional independence and this right must be protected at all costs, it was time that it became ‘more culturally literate in the context and interpretation of South African issues’ (Enterprise, November 2008: 59). He wrote:
... Many black journalists who are graduates of the Model C system or white universities were trained by white colleagues and, through no fault of theirs, also see western thinking and ways of doing things as the orthodoxy. And, add to this, the power dynamics and relations in South Africa are pro-western and Afrocentrism is viewed with curiosity.4
Mazwai opposed the idea of universal press freedom and suggested, rather, that press freedom was contingent within its particular context, in this case South Africa – an ‘African press freedom’. The ruling bloc calls this developmental journalism, which means that journalists should show support of the government’s transformation project. Developmental journalism, as I discuss in the next chapter, is rigidly designated through the fixed meaning imposed on it. In effect, the rich variety of meanings in the polyphonic voices of the media are halted through the injunction to be loyal by highlighting the positives while having convenient amnesia about the negatives. This contest played out in the immediate aftermath of the exposé of the former health minister. On one side the then CEO of the SABC, Dali Mpofu, launched a tirade against the newspaper’s journalists and then withdrew the SABC from Sanef membership. On the other side the then editor of the Sowetan, Thabo Leshilo, argued for universal press freedom. Mpofu announced on 31 August 2007, in a letter to Sanef, that he did not want to be associated with ‘enemies of our freedom and of our people’.
As editor-in-chief of the SABC it is my duty to inform you that we will no longer stand idle while we are being made a whipping boy and a scapegoat by the profit-driven media. Even less are we prepared to associate with the enemies of our freedom and our people. We cannot remain quiet while our mothers and our democratically chosen leaders are stripped naked for the sole reason of selling newspapers. This is women’s month nogal … When you … justify criminal theft you must know that you are NOT speaking for the SABC and the majority of South Africans. The same people who at the beginning of the year were frothing in the mouth about how soft the government is on crime are now flag bearers for the theft of medical records, which might actually result in endangering a human being’s life and her future treatment! How inhumane and how far removed from the basic value of ubuntu. Shame on all of you (SABC CEO in Mail & Guardian: 7-13 September 2007).
The hysteria is contained in phrases such as ‘shame on all of you’, and ‘our democratically chosen leaders are stripped naked’ by the ‘profit-driven media’. Using political economy arguments, Mpofu conflated issues. His discourse ideologically interpellated the Sunday Times as an enemy. But he went further, for in talking about ‘our people’ he merged the ANC with ‘the people’. Leshilo responded to Mpofu in a piece entitled ‘Enemies of the People?’ saying, ‘We are, after all, savages incapable of comprehending the intricacies of such “foreign” universal values as press freedom in a free society’’(Mail & Guardian: 7-13 September 2007) and adding that he had developed an ‘uncanny ability to detect racist slurs and stereotyping very early in life’. And so, to him:
... the most demeaning caricature remains that of black Africans as subhuman savages who missed the evolutionary bus. Sadly, that stereotype persists to this day that black people are concerned only with fulfilling their daily needs. And, many black commentators perpetuate the backward notion that we black people should not be concerned with such esoteric and European issues such as global warming or media freedom.
Leshilo found Mpofu’s letter to Sanef the ‘most explicit display I have yet encountered of the racist notion that genuine concern about the erosion of press freedom is nothing but a bourgeois indulgence or a white pastime’. Mpofu had attacked the independent media and said that in a new democracy it is ‘incumbent on all who treasure our freedom not to leave any uncontested space for those who seek to undermine or misrepresent it’. Leshilo countered this:
In other words, all black journalists and editors should rally behind him in the SABC’s imaginary war against black haters who hide behind press freedom to ‘hijack our democracy’ … Sorry Dali, I’m unavailable for this intellectual buffoonery. Similarly, you have only yourself to blame for your inability to understand that Sanef could accept funding from the SABC and still criticise it. That is what happens in a democracy. Mpofu and his cronies want to ram down our throats their sycophantic brand of patriotic journalism. This non-journalism would have us extol the expertise of the surgeons who successfully implanted Manto Tshabalala-Msimang’s new liver to show that we have world-class medical expertise. The Sunday Times today is the most hated newspaper in government circles because it dared to tell the public that she is a convicted thief whose ineptitude has ruined our public health system. Mpofu tells us that reporting in the public interest is inhumane and inimical to the values of ubuntu. He pours scorn on Sanef for defending the newspaper’s right to bring us these stories … We are after all, savages incapable of comprehending the intricacies of such ‘foreign’ universal values as press freedom in a free society.
Whereas for Mpofu the article exposing the former health minister as a drunk and a thief was inhumane, for Leshilo Mpofu’s response showed a lack of understanding about the role of the media in a democracy. Leshilo considered that it was the likes of Mpofu who were hijacking democracy, through their sycophancy. For Leshilo, sycophancy was non-journalism. He was not kow-towing to ‘white interests’ – he felt the Sunday Times was just serving ethical codes in the profession – as well as democracy – by being a watchdog and holding power to account. The phrase ‘universal values such as press freedom in a free society’ is apposite and leads to the question of universalism versus particularism and the clash of traditional values (as proffered by Mpofu), with the liberal values in the Constitution and which found their way into the public discourse. The clash was an example of a healthy contest for the unfolding, unrealised, incomplete and radically indeterminate democracy, with no ultimate reconciliation possible. It was one of the most serious fights for democracy between the media and the ANC.
Let us return here to this book’s concept of democracy, which is not a deliberation aimed at reaching the one rational solution to be accepted by all, but constitutes a confrontation among adversaries. However, in the master narrative formulated by the ANC and its supporters the media (in this case the Sunday Times) was not an adversary but an enemy – a hailing which showed the excess or surplus attached to the media. If you subtract the surplus you lose the enjoyment, and surplus is the last support of ideology (Žižek 1989: 124). In other words, if independent journalists were seen as legitimate adversaries there would be no excess. But they were conceptualised as enemy and positioned as outsiders to democracy. The displacement trick used here is that of heterogeneous antagonisms condensed into one entity. The heterogeneous antagonisms consisted of the labels, hailings or interpellations of anti-ubuntu, racist, enemies, that colonial creature,5 anti-transformation and imitators of universal values of the west. There was a symbolic over-determination invested in the media, as seen in the discourse of Mpofu. The interpellation was clear: it was a social demand, a symbolic injunction in the discursive, aimed to bring critics back into line, to rein them in. Of course, there is always the risk of misrecognition, that the subject won’t accept the label, as in the case of Leshilo who fought back against the totalising reduction of identity of the media being constructed as ‘enemy’. He made no turn towards the voice of interpellation, nor against himself.
The plurality of voices in civil society
While, on the one hand, the president, his health minister, the Office of the President, and the ANC all tried to create unity through ideological interpellation, the plurality in society reared its head in a display of democratic dissension, showing fluidity not unity. The news of the firing of Madlala-Routledge generated international headlines. Locally, opposition parties and civil society groups, including the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), Cosatu and the Aids Law Project (ALP), condemned the firing and circulated a petition to this effect. Fatima Hassan, senior attorney at the ALP and convenor of the Joint Civil Society Monitoring Forum, together with Mark Heywood, director of the ALP, commented:
Everyone seems to have forgotten about section 195 of the Constitution, which sets out the basic principles that should govern politicians. It states that public officials have a duty to promote and maintain a high standard of professional ethics, to be accountable, transparent and to respond to people’s needs. All politicians must provide the public with timely, accessible and accurate information. Is this not what Madlala-Routledge did at Mount Frere hospital, and on other occasions? (Mail & Guardian: 17-23 August 2007).
Hassan and Heywood went on to the following observation on Tshabalala-Msimang: ‘The minister’s conduct can also be measured accurately against the Constitution. Despite several Constitutional Court findings against her, she has remained part of the team. Indeed, she is the quintessential “team player’’. ‘Team player’ was innocuous enough on the surface but in South African politics, and in particular the politics between the media and the ANC, its meaning was intrinsically interwoven into, and bound up with, ideology, and how to stop dissension from the voice of authority or power.
The government’s side of the story
The spokesperson for the Department of Health in 2007, Sibani Mngadi, provided the reasons for Madlala-Routledge’s firing. ‘A self-proclaimed communist who became an idol of the opposition, the “bourgeois” media and global capital institutions, has ended up in conflict with the government she represented’, he wrote.
This is how one can sum up the three-year period of Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge as the deputy minister of health, which ended last week. She was dismissed for, among other things, flying to Spain with her son and a consultant despite her request to travel being disapproved by the president … When visiting Frere Hospital after a newspaper report alleged that it was experiencing a high level of maternal and infant mortality as a result of equipment and other problems, Madlala-Routledge declared a ‘national emergency’ to her invited media without consulting any other government authority. The effect of such a declaration on improving service delivery is yet to be felt. Her superior Tshabalala-Msimang used a different approach. She appointed a team of officials with expertise in maternal and child health to investigate, and their recommendations are being implemented by the national and provincial governments … Whatever her intentions were, Madlala-Routledge was loved by some international bodies that would like to change policies that are part of the government developmental agenda. She provided great opportunity for the opposition to attack health policies in particular, and she gave great sound bites to the media – but none of this was helpful to the institution she represented – the government of the people of South Africa (Mail & Guardian: 17-23 August 2007).
Mngadi, in representing the view of Mbeki, showed here how dissensus from the government line was not to be tolerated. His deflection tactic was to talk about a trip to Spain. Madlala-Routledge had embarrassed the government. But essentially she was just doing her job, which was to highlight problems of delivery in order to tackle them. For the government though, she was not a ‘team-player’: she questioned and did not follow the rules of the game. The political analyst, Judith February, head of Idasa’s Political Information and Monitoring Service, provided an analysis of the situation in an article ‘How sick is our democracy in light of Frere Hospital?’ She found that the response to the story was ‘hardly one of a government that empathises’ (Business Day: 27 August 2007):
Instead it was one of obfuscation and nitpicking about statistics. In the process, too, Mbeki has chosen, all too predictably, to shoot the messenger. Critics are either racists or anti-ANC. Black analysts, commentators or journalists who find themselves critical of government action become unhelpfully labelled as lackeys of white colonialists. Once one frames the public debate on such issues in such crass and absolute terms, it becomes very difficult to have any sort of debate about SA’s future. The reductionist logic of such labelling is, surely, insulting to black people as black critics are thereby perpetually viewed as unthinking. It also denies the complex reality of present day South African society where opinion has become far more nuanced and less influenced by race … There are concerns that the Madlala-Routledge dismissal is symbolic of a further shrinkage of the public space to debate, differ and ultimately decide our future trajectory … her dramatic dismissal has served to highlight several worrying examples of individuals either suspended or dismissed when they have tried to expose corrupt or wrongful action in the public sphere … So, while the constitutional framework within which SA operates provides the legal space for citizens to engage, the political reality is increasingly being marked by at best, increasing defensiveness by the government and at worst, plain intolerance of dissent.
February’s conclusion was instructive in the observation that agency, the participation of citizens and accountable governance were the lifeblood of democracy. Active citizenship, she felt, required that we continue to prise open the public space at all cost, or the consequences of passivity will be too great. This is precisely what the Sunday Times did: it prised open the public space through the unsavoury story of the former health minister at whatever cost this might incur. It caused both dislocation and fracture in society. Journalists who supported the publication of the story argued that they performed their professional roles and their function in a democracy, which was to hold power to account. They felt they owed ubuntu to the people of South Africa who were suffering under a health minister who was inept and a drunk, and who refused to provide adequate HIV/AIDS care in a country which still had the highest HIV infection rate in the world.
Ironically, this was the anti-ubuntu legacy left by Mbeki and Tshabalala-Msimang. The gaze, however, can be turned on the media and its inadequacies, and the question arises as to why the media didn’t investigate before 2007? After all, Tshabalala-Msimang became health minister in 1999, at the inception of Mbeki’s presidency. Was it not the duty and responsibility of the media to investigate the past of every public figure? The media’s role is to be loyal to citizens, act as a watchdog over the performance of government and civil society; its duty is to be vigilant and to expose malpractice in society and the state, even if it means having a robust fight. This deepens democracy.
Unity in society and ideology at work
In democratic discourse the media is widely acknowledged as a ‘public space’. The trick of obfuscation that February alluded to was ideology at work. The point is that ideology deflects from the key issue and, in Žižek’s words, ‘works best on the stupid subject’. Stupidity, Žižek asserted, was a key category in ideology (2007a: 200-201). Žižek’s theory of ideology stemmed from Lacan who was, in turn, influenced by Freud. Lacan said: ‘My teaching is in fact quite simply language and absolutely nothing else’ (2008: 26). While Lacan claimed to reduce his teaching to this simple statement, his central point was to emphasise how language shapes ideology. He said: ‘A lot of people here probably believe that language is superstructure. Even Mr Stalin did not believe that’. Lacan then referred to Freud: ‘Open the book on dreams,’ he wrote, ‘and you will see that he talks of nothing but things to do with words’. For Lacan, the subject performed a double function in language, as a divided self, a split subject. The postmodern subject was the split subject (we all, as postmodern subjects have multiple subjectivities – that of woman, feminist, mother, journalist, academic, author, black, middle class – so our loyalties are split between many different things). This is evident with the subjects discussed above: Mbeki’s love and hatred for the people; Madlala-Routledge confronted by the conundrum of loyalty to the ANC and government line on HIV/AIDS against her commitment and ubuntu in relation to people.
Žižek developed these notions further in his discussions on ideology and how it works best on the stupid subject, using Robert Zemeckis’s film Forrest Gump to explain the point (2007a: 200). The film, he observed, ‘offered as a point of identification, as the ideal ego, a simpleton and thus asserted stupidity as a key category of ideology’. The story is about the extraordinary life of a simple man who becomes a symbol of American heroism for his selfless attachment to his friends in Vietnam. Later, he is celebrated for his achievements. His girlfriend becomes a hippie, and later a stripper, and, for one night, his lover. The denouement: she dies from AIDS and leaves him to bring up their son. The symbolism in the story is that his stupidity makes him an unconscious participant in history, an automaton who executes orders. But ultimately he becomes a successful and wealthy man whereas his beloved fails despite being an active conscious agent. The film presents ideology at its purest, as non-ideological, an extra-ideological good-natured participation in social life, and its ultimate lesson is: ‘Don’t even try to understand; obey and you shall’. Gump ended up famous and a millionaire. His lover died of AIDS. The secret of ideology was revealed: its successful functioning involved the stupidity of its subjects.
There are parallels between this story and the relationship to power of Tshabalala-Msimang and Madlala-Routledge. The latter questioned, sought the truth, and was fired. The former followed the rules and kept her position (as did Gump). In this particular context, however, the subject was also an active agent, as hers was a strategic and instrumental deployment of stupidity to maximise her personal interests. She mouthed Mbeki’s positions at every turn. It was poverty that caused disease in general, and HIV/AIDS in particular. She claimed that antiretrovirals were poisonous and advocated instead a healthy diet of beetroot, onions, garlic, the African potato and vitamins. Zwelinzima Vavi and Žižek would probably agree if they had to theorise the issue of the treatment of the two ministers by Mbeki. Vavi said of Madlala-Routledge:
In the absence of any convincing explanation, we conclude that she was fired because of her views on HIV/AIDS, which were not shared by the president and Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang. It is very sad because this means the sheep mentality of following the leader will persist. It will deepen the culture of sycophancy among government ministers and officials (Mail & Guardian Online: 10 August 2007).
In this chapter, the issue of a ‘sheep mentality’ or sycophancy, of conflating disagreement with disloyalty, of obfuscation under the rubric of ‘ubuntu’, was raised by many voices in South Africa’s plural democracy. I have pointed to the diversity of dissenting voices. From different points on the civil society map we have heard voices, such as Leshilo’s, from the journalist sector; such as the voice of February from an independent political monitoring organisation; such as the voices of Heywood and Hassan from the non-governmental and HIV/AIDS sector; and the voice of Vavi from the union movement – all signalling the plurality of civil society and refuting the attempts at subjectivisation and ideological interpellation by the dominant political party. The contest internal to democracy itself also shows the radical ambiguity of the term ‘democracy’.
Universalism versus particularism: through the gaze of journalists
There is an enigma to universalism according to Žižek who asked: ‘How is it that Homer’s poem, The Iliad, even though it hailed from a particular historical context has retained its universal appeal today?’ (2007a: 214). Applying the Hegelian approach to universalism as opposed to the standard historicist approach, he explained his contention thus: ‘The universal appeal is founded upon a gap that is to say between their universality and their always imperfect realisation’. For him, it was precisely the issue of human rights that formed the basis for an ongoing appeal. He asked whether the appeal was universal or merely due to a specific western context.
This question, about universalisms and particularisms, was posed to editors too, concerning freedom of speech and the right of the newspaper to publish such a story. The journalists who were interviewed agreed that the Sunday Times should have published the exposé of the former health minister. They agreed that independence of the press was a ‘universal’ value in a democracy, thereby clashing with those who thought publication of the story demonstrated inhumanity. It was a clash of principles and ideas, although it could also be plausibly argued that the argument for the media lacking in ubuntu was merely an ideological deflection from the ruling party’s own inadequacies and its desire to protect ‘its own’ (or one of Mbeki’s own). Many of the journalists interviewed said that they did not buy into Mpofu’s ubuntu argument, and by so doing showed what Butler called ‘resignifications’, or detachment from passionate attachments to the past which are injurious (being soft on those of the same race as oneself, or loyalty to the ANC because it was the party of liberation).
The interviews were conducted in January and February 2008.
Justice Malala said:
This was a very scary development – a shooting the messenger phenomenon. There isn’t a single fact about what was exposed about her that was disputed. The paper was accused of trespassing on her dignity and her privacy but this is a public figure. Her drinking and kleptomania affected her work. I didn’t see what the problem was in exposing her except the ANC wanted to protect her. The SABC in its statements was then just an extension of the ANC. They accused the Sunday Times of a lack of ubuntu, among things, but what about the hundreds of thousands of lives lost because of this minister’s policies of not rolling out ARVs? There was also in the ubuntu argument an implication that we must protect this minister because she was black but the thousands of poor that have died from receiving no ARVs, were they not black? The Sunday Times did admirably well on the Manto issue and it showed up the government’s paranoia.
He mentioned the government’s ‘paranoia’ signalling that, in his view, there was an excess and surplus attached to the media by the ANC-led government.
Rehana Rossouw felt:
Independence of the media is a universal principle to me, closely tied to the principle of freedom of expression. Without a doubt the Sunday Times story on Manto Tshabalala-Msimang was in the public interest. I await eagerly the next instalment.
For Rossouw the issue was clear: the story was in the interest of the public and had to be covered.
Mondli Makhanya argued:
Independence of the media is a universal, no-compromise principle. It should be one hundred per cent a principle not contingent on particular stages of democracy. There is an argument that we shouldn’t see ourselves as an advanced democracy of the world, but then there are these countries that have made compromises; take the Zimbabwe media and where they ended up after being respectful to Zanu PF for too long. I have no regrets about the Manto Tshabalala-Msimang story. It was an important moment in South African media and in journalism because we took something that everyone was whispering about behind the scenes and brought it out in the open. It provoked; the government had never been shaken like that. The letters from the public and phone calls of support, even from ANC members who said ‘well done’ and ‘carry on’, were just great. They said thank you to me, and ‘you guys are brave and courageous’. Imagine that! ANC guys themselves were saying this. Sales went up which showed the credibility of the news item. People said this story was definitely in the interest of the public. The point is that when you put yourself in positions of leadership you have to behave in a certain way. I, Mondli Makhanya, as editor of the Sunday Times should be held to exactly the same standards being in a leadership position. I can’t just do certain things. You have to have that responsibility that comes with power.
Makhanya said that in retrospect he would publish the story all over again. He did not turn his back on the story, and showed no ambiguity. He was loyal to the public and to his profession.
Hopewell Radebe reflected:
Independence of the media is a principle that must be embraced but in the end it is as free as the ruling party allows it to be. The Manto story was in the public interest, because of her public stature. She abused her position and it was despicable. The newspaper was absolutely correct to get those documents – how else will we get some stories unless people give us documents? The documents prove that she was there at that clinic at that time. There was no invasion of privacy because none of the medical details about her particular condition were revealed in the stories. Fortunately, the court ruled that it was in the public interest. The court appreciated that her medical history was not revealed but that she was getting nurses to buy her booze and undermine their integrity and that she was a thief in her past was in the public interest. All cases of fraud and corruption are in the public interest, so with this stealing issue it’s the same thing. The media cannot be blamed for this story; we are part of the fight against corruption. The way the newspaper was treated was indeed a case of shoot the messenger.
Radebe’s words against the former minister were strong: exposing corruption was the media’s task in a democracy.
Abdul Milazi expressed:
Media freedom is a universal value to me. It is the oil that keeps the wheels of any democracy turning. I see no difference in the Manto Tshabalala-Msimang issue to that of the former US president Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky scandal, except that the former did not involve any sexual act. A government official who abuses power or acts in a manner unbecoming of someone holding public office should be exposed. The Sunday Times tackled the story, as any other newspaper anywhere in the world would have. I do not see why the Sunday Times coverage became such a big issue.
Milazi was also crystal clear that his role as a journalist was not to be loyal to the powerful but to hold powerful figures to account.
All the respondents felt that independence of the media and a free press were in the interests of democracy and formed a ‘universal’ value that should not be dependent or contingent on any particular stage of democracy. They were resisting being labelled enemies who lacked ubuntu and preferred not to recognise the calling and to adhere to the codes and principles of their profession. Theirs was a commitment to universal values which echoed Žižek’s in the quote that opens this chapter: ‘True universalists are not those who preach global tolerance of differences and all-encompassing unity, but those who engage in a passionate fight for the assertion of the Truth that enthuses them’ (2000a: 226). For Žižek, the conundrum of human rights forms is whether they are embedded in a specific western context or whether they are universal. He tries to recognise the universal appeal of human rights rather than dismiss them as imposed western values, a position with which I agree. Žižek noted in an interview in the Left Observer in February 2002 that certain values should not summarily be dismissed merely because of where they hail from.
This may sound racist, but I don’t think it is. Even when third world countries appeal to freedom and democracy, when they formulate their struggle against European imperialism, they are at a more radical level endorsing the European principle of universalism. You may remember that in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, the ANC always appealed to universal enlightenment values … (Žižek 2002b).
Ironic, then, that after apartheid, some unenlightened views were emerging within the ANC, as reflected in the debate over the former health minister’s exposure in the media. I agree with Žižek that to dismiss universalism would be ‘left conservatism’. At the same time, the discourse of journalists supporting the publication of the story, despite harsh ideological interpellations from the ruling bloc, showed the universalism of freedom of speech in action and the rich plurality and multiplicity of voices, all of which contribute towards deepening spaces for democracy. It also showed a turning away from and refusal to recognise the ideological interpellations, rather than a turning towards the voice of power. No reflexive turns were witnessed.
Further subjection: the attempted Koni Media buyout
Further attempted subjection of the Sunday Times occurred when political connections of Mbeki established a company to buy out the country’s biggest independent newspaper. The story broke in the Sunday Times in a headline ‘Mbeki Men in R7-bn bid to own Sunday Times’ (Sunday Times: 4 November 2007). Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?6 Not yet, but the Koni buyout bid for the company that owned the Sunday Times was alarming. Why? Because the timing was suspect; it came shortly after the exposés in the Daily Dispatch and the Sunday Times. Mbeki’s advisor, Titus Mafolo; the foreign affairs communications spokesperson, Ronnie Mamoepa; the retired chief of state protocol, Billy Modise; and businessman, Groovin Nchabeleng – all partners in Koni – made a R7 billion takeover bid (later reduced to R5 billion) for Johncom7 in November 2007, within a few months of the events detailed above. Nchabeleng denied that the company was a front for the ANC and Mbeki. He denied that Koni Media was a threat to media freedom. The bid raised questions about the ANC’s commitment to the independence of the media, and brought to the fore the organisation’s plans to take the proposal for a media appeals tribunal to its December 2007 policy conference in Polokwane. However, while there was no proof that the Koni bid consisted of Mbeki’s friends it still raised the question of political interference in editorial content. The chairperson of Sanef at the time, Raymond Louw, agreed: ‘This is deeply alarming, as the company [Koni] is composed of prominent civil servants, and this may be an attempt to bring their own opinions to the Sunday Times’ (Sunday Times: 4 February 2008). He continued: ‘We are not suggesting that they are out to suppress press freedom but, as civil servants, they represent government’s viewpoint and they could use the publications as a platform for government propaganda’. Louw made an instructive point: ‘I cannot imagine how Mafolo, for instance, would allow a newspaper to publish stories like those on health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang’. The attempted buyout created heated debate and put the ANC on the defensive. Pallo Jordan (at the time an ANC national executive member and chairperson of its communications subcommittee) argued:
There is always resistance when people who support the ruling party want to buy a newspaper. Why should it be seen as something dubious? Is it being suggested that people who support the ANC should not have a voice in the media? (The Star: 11 February 2008)
Arguing for diversification of media ownership, as the ANC had done on numerous occasions, was one issue, but owning newspapers and then calling this ‘diversification’ is quite another and to conflate the two was rather disingenuous. A former ambassador and chief of state protocol, Billy Modise, argued that his interest was ‘purely business’ (Sunday Times: 11 November 2007). When questioned about the high price of the bid when the company was probably worth R3.5 billion he responded: ‘I’m sorry, I am not able to argue back and forth on this. We are still waiting to see what other bids are and where our bid will stand’ (The Star: 11 February 2008). Mbeki dismissed the allegations that a government front company was involved in a takeover bid. Speaking at a gathering of the International Investment Council on 11 November 2007, he scoffed: ‘Let’s stop the propaganda. The media should not be raising ‘scarecrows’ but should do its homework first and study the company [Koni]’ (The Star: 11 February 2008).
There were some in the national political discourse over the Koni bid, close allies of Mbeki, who saw the development as a positive one, with no sinister or cynical Machiavellian motives behind it. The businessman, Onkgopotse JJ Tabane, wrote:
Last week’s bid for the ownership of Johncom by the Mvelaphanda group, as well as another possible bid by Koni Media Holdings, is a positive sign of the future diversity of one of the most influential groups in media landscape. Somebody has seen the light … In a country where more than 70% of the electorate have voted for the ANC, it should come as no surprise that many deals will be linked with people who have some kind of connection to the ANC or government … This link, however, cannot be used to prejudice these people and dismiss them immediately as surrogates of government. … We live in interesting times. And so we watch as the cookie crumbles and arguments for the status quo in media monopolies remain, now dressed in the borrowed robes of concern for freedom of expression and the imagined threat to press freedom (The Star: 12 November 2007).
For Tabane, a government monopoly would be better than a capitalist monopoly Thami Mazwai was also supportive of the buyout and he racialised the issue: while he found the uproar ‘fascinating and typically South African’, upon a ‘closer look at the basis of the outrage’, he found ‘the usual suspects’ which he reckoned to be the country’s ‘right-wing dynasty masquerading as liberals, as Suresh Roberts has poignantly observed’ (The Star: 12 November 2007).
Suresh Roberts continued:
Of course they are joined by their black fellow travellers, whom Christine Qunta graciously refers to as Askaris … There is nothing wrong with liberalism as it represents lofty ideals worldwide; however as pointed out, South Africa’s liberal constituency consists of dyed in the wool right wingers whose sole purpose is to ensure that blacks do not mess up this democracy, which is defined in their terms ...
Professor Guy Berger entered the fray, observing that race had become the all-consuming issue. Berger felt that to function fully in democratic governance, the media should stay separate from the state and that ‘political ownership by anyone is not good for democracy’ (Mail & Guardian: 16-22 November 2007). A simple and apposite point.
A Business Day editorial entitled, ‘The passion counts’, reflected in a light tone on the Koni bid:
There’s not a print journalist worth his or her salt who doesn’t dream of owning a newspaper one day. So we understand how a group of bright South Africans might dream of owning the Sunday Times and its many sister newspapers in the Johncom group ... Perhaps the entry of a group of Mbeki loyalists into the press would be no catastrophe. But if they don’t win the Sunday Times, will they still dream of newspapers? We doubt it. You don’t bid for Johncom at a huge premium and without a business plan unless you don’t care about how you’re going to make a profit. And if you’re not in it for the money, then your bid’s political and, ultimately, a sham. The passion counts (Business Day: 7 November 2007).
There was no passion for journalism in the Koni bidders. Bruce’s editorial made sense. Since the bid was unsuccessful, there were no further ‘dreams of owning newspapers’ that found expression in Koni or any other consortium until The New Age newspaper venture in 2010.
Before concluding these postmodern/psychoanalytical reflections on the situation of the Sunday Times and its attempted subjectivisation, I want to suggest that these events constituted a negative turning point in ANC-media relations. At the ANC’s National Policy Conference in Polokwane in December 2007, four months after the former health minister’s exposure began, a resolution was passed for a media appeals tribunal to be investigated. Such a tribunal would, in effect, herald state control of the media.
Failed subjection, resignifications and half-turns
How are we to blend this empirical case study and interviews with the theoretical concepts delineated at the outset: ideology, subjection, excess, surplus and the three kinds of subjects, subjectivities, and subjectivisation? First, there is the ideological subjection of Tshabalala-Msimang by Mbeki: she was the loyal, unquestioning subject but one who was also an active agent in promoting the former president’s denialist AIDS policies. Second, we had the questioning subject, Madlala-Routledge, who was fired for not toeing the ideological line. Third, there was attempted subjection of the Sunday Times, through the threatened arrest of the editor and his senior journalist; the threat from minister in the presidency, Essop Pahad, that the government should consider withdrawing its advertising; and the attempted buyout of the Sunday Times by Koni.
The Master-Signifier was race in the cases of the exposure of the former health minister and the buyout bid. Those who were against the publication of the story – Mazwai, Mpofu and Suresh Roberts – hailed journalists in varied ways (for example, Makhanya was called that ‘colonial creature’ in the Mail & Guardian Online of 15 June 2007). The journalists were unfairly labelled as racist enemies pandering to western notions of a free press and with no understanding of what transformation entailed. But the real reason for the labelling was that they were not bowing down to the master narrative of the ANC. Those in support of the story being published argued in the name of exposing the abuse of power, the unfit nature of the health minister to hold that particular portfolio, professional ethics, and loyalty to citizenry and democracy. Loyalty to democracy, as editors’ said, meant loyalty to the public, irrespective of race, class, gender or political affiliation. The populist intervention (if you expose corruption but it is ‘one of our own’ you are exposing, then you are anti-transformation, you are anti-black, and therefore you are an enemy of the people) was illogical, a reductionist master narrative and a rigidifying of the meaning of transformation and of democracy. The radical ambiguity of the term ‘democracy’ was shown: everyone was fighting in its name.
Then, we have the subject formation of Madlala-Routledge. For asserting herself and speaking out about conditions at the Mount Frere Hospital and for criticising the ‘beetroot policies’ of Tshabalala-Msimang, she was labelled as a ‘non-team player’, who was courting the international media. She caused dislocation in the imagined united social, and she was fired from her job. It would also seem that she ‘lost’. But democracy in South Africa is a constantly negotiated, fluid, open-ended space, radically ambiguous, as stated earlier. This is reflected in the events at Polokwane in December 2007, where Mbeki was axed in a most humiliating but bloodless coup, by a narrow margin, which saw the populist favourite, Jacob Zuma, become president. Madlala-Routledge returned when the ANC appointed her as deputy speaker of the House of Assembly after the 2008 elections.
Besides the multiple subjectivities and subjections, this fight between the Sunday Times and the former minister of health showed that South Africa was a fluid society, undecidable in nature and unessentialised, as characterised by the post-modern condition, with robust fights and contestations. However, there were clear attempts by many within the ruling bloc to hegemonise the social by creating unity and foreclosures. This was done through ideological interpellations and the attempted buyout of the company which publishes the Sunday Times in an attempt to rein journalists in. The media played the role of watchdog by attempting to hold power to account and speaking truth to power, but did not recognise the ideological labellings. The newspaper and especially its editor, Makhanya’s brave resistance to the attempted subjectivisation signalled an optimistic moment for its role in a democracy.
NOTES
1(Žižek 2000a: 226). Žižek used the example of unconditional Christian universalism, where everyone can be redeemed, since in the eyes of Christ there are no Jews, Greeks, no men, no women. However, in this chapter I argue that the true universalists were, for example, Leshilo, who was fighting against the particularisms of journalists such as Thami Mazwai and Dali Mpofu who themselves argued that Sunday Times journalists were lifting values not intrinsic to Africa - as in freedom of speech - and were then lacking in ‘ubuntu’ or human kindness and compassion.
2Ubuntu is an isiZulu word meaning the essence of humanity, compassion and kindness or ‘I am what I am because of who we all are’.
3Professor Kader Asmal, who was Mbeki’s minister of education, confirmed this. He was a keynote speaker at the University of the Witwatersrand on the occasion of the commemoration of Black Wednesday, 19 October 2010, on the topic ‘Free speech is life itself ’. He said during the discussion time: ‘We were not allowed to voice our opposition to certain policies such as HIV/AIDS and Zimbabwe’ (Asmal 2010).
4While Mazwai, in this article, was talking directly to the issue of Zapiro’s Lady Justice cartoon in 2008, the question of freedom of speech and culture and traditional values was raised in South Africa in earnest after the Sunday Times stories on the health minister in 2007.
5This was a gem from Ronald Suresh Roberts, an ardent Mbeki supporter, who called Makhanya ‘colonial creature’ in the article ‘Ronald Suresh Roberts’s ode to Mbeki’ (Mail & Guardian Online: 15 June 2007).
6Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism is a book by Žižek (2002a) in which he says the minute one accepts the term ‘totalitarianism’ then one is already in the liberal democratic horizon.
7Johncom became Avusa at the end of 2007 and is the company that owns the Sunday Times, the country’s largest newspaper. It also owns the Sowetan, Sunday World, Daily Dispatch and has a fifty per cent stake in Business Day and Financial Mail.