   |
|
afrol News, 22 May - The intervention by eleven prominent black professionals and business people, who sponsored a full-page advertisement in, The Sunday Times two weeks ago, has sparked one of the most meaningful debates about the role of the media in our post-apartheid democracy, claims the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA). In essence, the 11 signatories - among them veteran captains of black empowerment Don Ncube and Peter Vundla, and outspoken black consciousness lawyer Christine Qunta - are alleging a right-wing conspiracy in the "white" media systematically to discredit and undermine black people in positions of power. The signatories, clearly prompted by the widespread criticism of President Thabo Mbeki over the so-called plot to over-throw him, claim that to question Mbeki's rule only two years into his first five-year term is to "seek to subvert the will of the majority". - The reactions of leading commentators and intellectuals are instructive, according to MISA Researcher Zoe Titus: Sipho Seepe, a mathematician and political commentator writing in the Mail & Guardian, charged the signatories with "political mischief, dishonesty and intellectual naivety ... and economic self-interest". Noting Mabuchi's "consistent attacks on black intellectuals", Seepe concluded that as long as blacks continued to be duped by "a desperate and vulgar appeal to racism" they would continue to rally round the wrong leaders. Writing in The Sunday Times, Xolela Mangcu, the director of the Steve Biko Foundation, expressed concern that the signatories' argument relied on logic of black authenticity, which put black solidarity above everything else. - Why should those who speak in the name of black authenticity predicate the moral integrity of black people according to the actions of whites? Mangcu asked. Mathatha Tsedu, the deputy editor of The Star and the chair of the South African National Editors' Forum, said the solution to the problems raised in the advertisement would be found only when "black people own their own media in a critical mass". - As black people we should stop basing our hopes and aspirations on the benevolence of a community whose interests, in the main, are inimical to our own understanding of life, he wrote in The Star. Duma Gqubule, a freelance journalist and former researcher on the black empowerment commission, writing in The Sunday Independent yesterday, argues for a reconstruction tax in the absence of a voluntary and visible redistribution of the country's wealth and resources to reverse the growing racial polarisation around transformation and the lack thereof. According to analyst Zoe Titus, "It is, of course, a debate about whether this society will do more than pay lip service to the freedom of expression enshrined in our constitution. But it is also a debate about what the emerging South African nation will regard as legitimate criticism - and when the media will close ranks with the government and other institutions in society in the face of external criticism as, for instance, the media in France do." Potential candidates for national consensus are the fight against HIV/Aids, the fight against poverty, the fight against racism and the socio-economic legacy of apartheid, and the need to nurture democracy and consolidate South Africa's racial, cultural and ethnic diversity. "How these objectives arc achieved should be the subject of the most open debate possible in the media and the public arena," concludes Titus. - If the media could, as an institution, reach some informal consensus on these issues they could help create a meaningful dialogue between the media and the state and forestall the racial exclusivity implied in the signatories' statement and the utterances of some of the commentators who have entered the fray, says Titus. - Ideally, the media should be the government's most consistent critics at home but should be ambassadors for the country abroad, Titus concludes. "Neither white nor black media can achieve that. Only a truly South African press will do."
|
