“It is 2012, and what have we got? An SABC that is still the government’s timid servant – and another government that believes it’s entitled to act in secret to the detriment of its citizens.” Noseweek, issue 158
“The SABC is going to court to force a journalist and a film maker to hand over all the material she used to create a documentary it commissioned and later mothballed”, Charl Blignaut, City Press 30/6/2013
The most recent threat by the SABC to use tax and TV licence payer money to shut down debate about corruption is disturbing but not without precedent.
The facts are simple and were set out in December last year in a Noseweek article by freelance documentary producer Sylvia Vollenhoven and in the magazine’s editorial in that issue.
The court papers and the related correspondence have been posted on the Grubstreet website.
As Noseweek editor, Martin Welz and Sylvia Vollenhoven have both repeatedly made a matter of recent public record, the story which resulted in the SABC’s litigious threat is already in the public domain and has been for three years. Vollenhoven used the original Noseweek story, carried in its September 2010 issue, as the basis for her script.
“Project Spear tells the story of a former MI6 spy who allegedly presented the South African government with a plan – called Project Spear – to recover money misappropriated by apartheid-era banker.
“It questions why the ANC allegedly refused to take action to punish apartheid leaders.” [“SABC takes journo to court over doccie”, Charl Blignaut, City Press 30/6/2013]
This will not be the first time that the SABC has approached the courts or threatened to approach the courts to suppress information that it deemed to be possibly detrimental to the African National Congress or itself and that it wanted to keep from the public – information which, like Project Spear story, was already in the media.
An example was the Sunday Times front page lead on 22 March 2009. The newspaper had based its story on a leaked forensic report which alleged that an SABC employee, Matilda Gaboo, seemingly a close friend of senior ANC member Matthews Phosa, had potentially corruptly looted the SABC of R100 million. Despite the fact that a précis of the report had been reproduced by the newspaper and subsequently followed up by other newspapers and internet websites, the SABC saw fit to spend tax and TV licence payer’s money in litigating for the return of the report – in essence exactly what it now threatens to do again to prevent the public from assessing Sylvia Vollenhoven’s programme for itself.
In dismissing the SABC’s application with costs in the South Gauteng High Court on 14 October that year, Judge Nigel Willis summed up by saying … “the horse has bolted.”
Two months later on the 28 May 2009, we had a situation which exactly replicates what is happening now with Noseweek and Sylvia Vollenhoven. With the SABC having twice scheduled and then cancelled a promised showing of a Special Assignment programme on political satire, the Mail&Guardian placed the video on its website.
The SABC immediately laid charges with the police against the newspaper as the following extract from a contemporary issue of the Sowetan reveals:
‘The SABC contends that Mail&Guardian is “unlawfully in possession of their property”.
‘The newspaper – it had 40 000 hits yesterday – was overwhelmed by visitors to the site that they had to host the cartoon on a secondary site zoopy.com.
‘The SABC decided to report the matter to the police yesterday and allow the law to take its course.
“We view this matter in a serious light as this is SABC property, which was unlawfully obtained by Mail & Guardian online,” the SABC said yesterday.
Mail & Guardian editor-in-chief Nic Dawes, however, defended the newspaper’s decision to publish the show.
“We are quite confident that we have done the right thing by showing the show. The fact that the SABC pulled off the show twice, we think this is the right time for the public to make up their own minds about it.
“For the SABC to call us unprofessional, coming from them, we take it as a compliment. What this whole thing has demonstrated is the fact that for the SABC to try and exercise censorship during this age of the Internet will prove extremely difficult,” said Dawes.
The Freedom of Expression Institute said it was sad for the SABC to be seen to be fighting fellow media houses instead of showing the programme.
“It is a negative thing and they are not going to win the public by doing this. Instead they should be showing the programme instead of fighting the Mail &Guardian because this is a popular programme that the public loves,” Pat Skinner, deputy director of FXI, told Sowetan yesterday
The “offending” cartoon episode of Special Assignment was supposed to be shown on Tuesday and was withdrawn at the 11th hour for the second time within a few weeks. Last year the SABC was also caught in a similar situation when it withdrew a documentary about Thabo Mbeki twice, raising more or less similar arguments. But producers Redi Thlabi and Ben Cashdan showed it to the public at community halls before it was flighted on SABC.
Nothing came of the SABC’s threat but why would it not flight this programme? The answer is simple and yet another example of the way in which a supposedly public broadcaster continually and obsequiously genuflects to Luthuli House. The programme contained an interview with cartoonist Jonathan Schapiro (Zapiro) and it is common cause that the party regards him as disrespectful of the party in general and President Jacob Zuma in particular.
And then in November 2009, for the third time that year, there was again controversy over the SABC’s pro-ANC censorship. Auckland Park took so long to consider a television documentary – also commissioned for its Special Assignment programme – on the alleged complicity of former President Thabo Mbeki in Aids deaths, that the producers, the Health-e news agency, in despair, offered it to e.tv.
Debra Patta, producer of e.tv’s 3rd Degree investigative news programme instantly accepted the documentary, entitled The Price of Denial, and it was duly broadcast. Nobody sued e.tv or the Health-e News Agency.
Not unsurprisingly, the SABC defended its failure to timeously broadcast The Price of Denial. Spokesman Kaiser Kgnyago said the main difficulty the Corporation had with the documentary was that Mbeki had not been fairly portrayed and that he was not given the right of reply.
Beeld reported on Tuesday that the documentary would be screened on e.tv’s 3rd Degree after the SABC refused to air it.
“The programme was initially made for SABC’s Special Assignment, but the corporation apparently decided that the allegations against Mbeki were too controversial, and even unfounded,” Beeld reported.
“The film looks at the havoc that Aids denialism has wreaked,” said 3rd Degree executive producer Debora Patta.
“It’s a damning documentary. We offered Mbeki a chance to respond, and he declined.”
So did the SABC ever approach Mbeki as e.tv did, or did it simply unilaterally decide that the program did not reflect well on the ANC and stall? And what was to stop the SABC airing the programme and inviting Mbeki into the studio for a follow up interview i.e. what has been conventional television news practice all over the world for decades?
Fast forward to December 2012 and the public is once again denied by the SABC an opportunity to see an interview with cartoonist Jonathan Schapiro, this time a pre-recorded interview for the SABC3 programme Interface.
For once we got an unequivocal reason from the SABC.
Haludi Motsoeneng, the catalyst in the recent implosion of the SABC board, unashamedly said that the programme was censored because Shapiro’s cartoons were an insult to President Jacob Zuma. The ANC, allegedly a proponent of free speech and media freedom, maintained a complicit silence.
And in June 2006, just as the SABC is now trying to gag Welz and Vollenhoven and demanding the return of all copies of The Spear, the SABC tried to gag Redi Direko (now Thlabi) and Ben Cashdan of Broad Daylight Films over another production it had commissioned, Thabo Mbeki:Unauthorised.
The documentary was advertised to be broadcast on SABC3 on May 17, but was cancelled at the 11th hour.
A carefully worded statement this week from the film’s producers, Redi Direko and Ben Cashdan, said they had been “instructed by the SABC’s lawyers not to discuss the Thabo Mbeki documentary any further and to hand over any copies in our possession”.
The producers said they had “agreed, at this time, to comply”. This suggests that Broad Daylight is considering fighting the ban on allowing them to participate in the public debate around the SABC’s pulling of the film.
Freedom of Expression Institute (FXI) director Jane Duncan said the “gagging order” from the SABC’s lawyers was a blatant breach of the producers’ constitutional rights to freedom of speech and that the FXI had consulted advocate Dumisa Ntsebeza to fight the case on their behalf.
“The SABC’s treatment of the producers is appalling,” Duncan said. “The fact that they agreed to a confidentiality clause matters little… there is an overriding public interest in having the issues around the documentary aired.
But while the SABC succeeded recently in intimidating Vollenhoven when she hoped to screen The Spear at the Franschoek Literary festival in May, Direko and Cashdan refused to buckle to the SABC’s pro-ANC censorship. Defiantly, they repackaged Thabo Mbeki:Unauthorised as Thabo Mbeki:Unbanned and, more than a year later, showed it at venues throughout the country including Soweto, Khayelitsha and Kwa Mashu.
The SABC impotently and once again threatened legal action and, through spokesman Kganyago, raged that the producers were “undermining the SABC”.
The South African public was neither impressed nor intimidated.
The film was also shown at the recently ended Grahamstown National Arts Festival to full houses. Hordes of people had to be turned away when there was a near stampede with festival goers demanding to see the documentary which was also screened at the Durban International Film Festival.
To pull all the threads together of this relentlessly continuing censorship by omission to protect the ruling party, here is a timeline that lays out
10 June 2006. The SABC threatens legal action if the producers of a commissioned but canned documentary so much as talk about it. Direko and Cashdan of Broad Daylight Films issue a statement in connection with the documentary, Thabo Mbeki:Unauthorised saying they had been “instructed by the SABC’s lawyers not to discuss the Thabo Mbeki documentary any further and to hand over any copies in our possession”.
The producers said they had “agreed, at this time, to comply”. This suggests that Broad Daylight is considering fighting the ban on allowing them to participate in the public debate around the SABC’s pulling of the film.
15 June 2006. Dali Mpofu, CEO of the SABC, calls a press conference to explain why the SABC had declined to broadcast Thabo Mbeki:Unauthorised and lashes out at the producers.
16 October 2006. Business Day reveals that the SABC has lost a court case seeking to force the Mail & Guardian to remove from its website the findings of the Corporation’s own Zwelakhe Sisulu/Gilbert Marcus commission of inquiry in Snuki Zikalala’s ‘blacklist’ of commentators who he perceived to be critical of then President Thabo Mbeki. The SABC had declined to make the commission’s findings public whereupon the newspaper published a leaked copy of its report on its website. The judge found that it was in the public interest to publish the findings.
12 July 2007. A year after the SABC threatened legal action against Direko and Cashdan if they so much as spoke about the documentary, Thabo Mbeki:Unauthorised, which the Corporation had commissioned and refused to broadcast, a re-edited version under a different title, Thabo Mbeki:Unbanned, is broadcast throughout the country. The SABC again threatens legal action but does nothing.
22 March 2009. The Sunday Times publishes a leaked SABC forensic report on alleged corruption within the SABC and the Corporation institutes legal proceedings to get it back even though the news was already in the public domain.
29 May 2009. Sunday World reveals that the SABC has laid charges of theft against the Mail & Guardian after the newspaper published on its website a Special Assignment-commissioned documentary on political satire which the Corporation had refused to broadcast because it contained an interview with cartoonist Zapiro who the broadcaster considered disrespectful of President Jacob Zuma. Nothing ever comes of the charges and the website gets tens of thousands of hits.
14 October 2009. Judge Nigel Willis dismisses with costs an SABC application compelling the Sunday Times to return a leaked forensic report alleging corruption at the SABC.
15 November 2009. e.tv screens The Price of Denial after the SABC, having been given first option to broadcast, effectively declined.
14 December 2012. The Mail & Guardian reveals that for the third time in a matter of weeks the SABC has banned interviews with political cartoonist Jonathan Schapiro (Zapiro).
30 June 2013. City Press reveals that, once again, the SABC is threatening legal action to silence the producer of a commissioned documentary which, for reasons of political censorship, it has declined to broadcast even though the information was already in the public domain. In this case it is Sylvia Vollenhoven’s documentary, The Spear.
Can anything be done about the constant threat that the SABC poses to media freedom?
Shortly after being appointed as the successor to the allegedly corruption-prone Dina Pule, the new communications minister, Yunus Carrim, said:
“We simply have no choice. The public out there, the business community, trade union movements and society have reached a limit of tolerance about the difficulties we have been having in the SABC.”
Hopefully, having made his choice, he will translate words into deeds and persuade what is widely perceived to be a state broadcaster dictated to by Luthuli House, to stop its vendetta against Noseweek and Sylvia Vollenhoven.
That needs to happen because eNCA, without receiving a cent of taxpayer’s money, has double the number of viewers for its flagship 7pm English television news bulletin than the SABC3 equivalent.
That should tell him something.
As a postscript it should be noted that on 21 July the Sunday Times carried an article headlined ‘SA resigned to abuse says UK filmmaker’. It referred to a documentary on police brutality in this country directed and produced by Inigo Gilmore and broadcast by Channel 4’s news slot, Dispatches.
What is relevant in the context of this article is that Gilmore, who lived in this country for five years as a reporter for leading British newspapers, said he offered the documentary – South Africa’s Dirty Cops – to local broadcasters including the SABC but without success so far.
Given the SABC’s long history – as outlined above – of not screening material which is critical of ANC governance, what are the chances now?
IMAGE: Project Spear Facebook page.
