Business Report can reveal that the report made no adverse findings against Matjila, Sekunjalo chairperson Dr Iqbal Survé and his companies, and other black-owned companies. Sources claim that Matjila was described as a credible witness and his submission to Judge Lex Mpati as impeccable. ~ Sizwe Dlamini and Adri Senekal de Wet PIC Inquiry report clears ex-CEO Dan Matjila, black-owned companies, 24 February 2020
Sekunjalo Group Chairman Doctor Iqbal Survé says he intends to take the findings of the Mpati Commission of Inquiry on legal review. The Commission probed improprieties at the Public Investment Corporation and contraventions of legislation that led to undue benefits. Some of the findings include that Sekunjalo’s subsidiary AYO Technology’s shares were manipulated by Survé. This meant the PIC bought R13 billion worth of AYO shares when the assets of the company were valued at R292 million. ~ Dr Iqbal Survé to take Mpati Commission of Inquiry findings on legal review SABC TV News, 12 May 2021
In late 2018 Dougie Oakes, the former political editor of the Cape Times, wrote a prescient article headlined ‘Time to go, Iqbal’. There was no response from Independent Media to the article, which contained this sentence: ‘I’ve never come across a group where lies have been peddled with such glib assurance …’
His claim became incontrovertible after the release of the final report of the Mpati Commission in March 2020.
Anyone who watched 77 witnesses give eight months’ of televised under-oath evidence at the Mpati Commission of Inquiry, which ran from 21 January to 14 August 2019, must have realised that the Commission’s final report would, inevitably, be a damning indictment of Iqbal Survé and Dan Matjila.
This became evident most particularly in the sworn testimony of AYO employees Abdul Malick Salie and Nahied Gamieldien and former AYO employees Kevin Hardy and Siphiwe Nodwele.
To counter this, Independent Media launched a frenzied and brazenly dishonest pre-emptive propaganda campaign.
Six front page articles – see here and here and here and here and here and here – were pumped out between December 2019 and March the following year by Adri Senekal de Wet, Ayanda Mdluli and Sizwe Dlamini proclaiming that first a ‘leaked’ report and then the report itself had completely exonerated Survé and Matjila.
Devoid of truth
At the time, both Rebecca Davis and I, providing empirical evidence to the contrary, pointed out that such claims were devoid of truth as even a cursory reading of the Commission’s final report proved beyond any shadow of doubt.
The intro sentence to Davis’s Daily Maverick article said it all: “Almost three weeks before the public release of the PIC report, the Iqbal Survé-owned Independent group was claiming that the report cleared both Survé and former PIC CEO Dan Matjila of any wrongdoing. That was a lie.”
Anyone with access to the internet need merely go to page to page 60 of the report and read for themselves why the Mpati commissioners called for all the transactions involving Survé and Matjila to be investigated.
Here are a few extracts:
- Page 60: The Sekunjalo investments showed a marked disregard for PIC policy and standard operating procedures.
- Page 122: Dr Matjila’s justification for investing in AYO is moreover a post facto tailoring of facts and a dishonest one. He vacillated in relation to what authority he had been acting on when he signed the AYO irrevocable subscription form.
- Page 317: The Sekunjalo investments showed a marked disregard for PIC policy and standard operating procedures.
- Page 317:The close relationship between Dr Matjila and Dr Survé created top down pressures that the deal teams experienced to get the requisite approvals.
- Page 339: From the outset it appears that the PIC’s interactions with and investments in the Sekunjalo Group were questionable. The different investment proposals emanated from direct discussions between Dr Survé and Dr Matjila.
- Page 341: The AYO transaction demonstrates the malfeasance of the Sekunjalo Group, the impropriety of the process and practice of the PIC as well as the gross negligence of both the CEO and CFO.
- Page 413: The proposed Sagarmatha transaction, including the suspected share price manipulation and essentially attempting to use the PIC’s own investment to pay the debt INMSA owed to the PIC, demonstrates a lack of ethics, lack of compliance with laws and regulation, and a disregard for the best interests of the PIC and its clients.
That’s as far away from complete exoneration as darkness is from light yet there was no response to the articles by Rebecca Davis and I.
The denouement came when the very people they were seeking to protect with their mendacious journalism threw Senekal de Wet, Mdluli and Dlamini under the bus.
Given the presumably welcome and seemingly satisfactory ‘exoneration’ outcome as proclaimed in Independent Media outlets, why did Iqbal Survé tell parliament’s Standing Committee on Finance (SCOF) 15 months later that he was taking the findings of the Commission on legal review?
Consider, furthermore, this article by Dlamini – the one headlined ‘Dan Matjila owed an apology by media’ – the article in which he accuses South African journalists working for rival media companies of being racists:
“Dan Matjila is a man of great integrity, skill and ability. Those who doubted his integrity owe him a sincere apology by the media and. He is someone that South Africa’s business community can ill afford to lose. Perhaps had Matjila been running some of our SOEs they would actually be contributing to the fiscus and not draining us.
“If I had a choice, I would insist that the President appoints Matjila to run the state bank or sovereign fund which he alluded to in his SONA address.”
If that is true, if Matjila was totally exonerated by the Mpati Commission as Dlamini, Senekal de Wet and Mdluli claim, why did he file a review application in November last year?
Among the assertions Matjila is challenging are the commission’s statements that he was “economical with the truth” when he testified before it, that he was quick to take credit when things went well but passed the buck when the outcome was bad, and that he did deals that added no value to the PIC.
Both accounts can’t be true – if the Mpati Commission found no fault with him, according to Independent Media reports, why is Matjila challenging the Commission findings?
Why, in fact, has he not publicly welcomed the Mpati Commission final report?
What prompted these journalists to gamble their professional reputations by writing such articles to protect two people whose conduct has harmed the financial security in the final years of their lives when they are at their most vulnerable of almost two million government employees and current civil service pensioners? Their ‘exoneration’ articles reveal the cynicism behind the Sekunjalo corporate mission claim to always “Do good, do well”.
Have Dlamini, Senekal de Wet and Mdluli noticed and would they care to comment on the fact that the AYO shares which Matjila’s interventions caused the PIC to buy for R43 each are now selling on the JSE for three rand each? That has resulted in a R4-billion decline in the value of the PIC’s investment and a concomitant loss to the civil servants whose monthly stop-order pension fund deductions made this share purchase possible.
Have they noticed that they and they alone were promoting the defamatory allegation that, like the Seriti Commission, the Mpati Commission had produced an exculpatory report despite ample evidence to the contrary?
Damning indictment
Far from being an exoneration, the Mpati Commission final report is a damning indictment of Survé and Matjila. This was accurately reflected in the contemporary headlines and articles by journalists working for rival media companies:
Kyle Cowan – PIC investments in Survé’s Sekunjalo Group clearly flouted policy, report finds
Ann Crotty – PIC and Sekunjalo: a bizarre, value-destroying relationship
Alec Hogg – Mpati’s final report delivered: Survé Media has run out of road.
Ray Mahlaka – Dan Matjila’s conduct was ‘wholly improper’, inquiry finds
Tando Maeko – PIC Commission – Matjila acted improperly on AYO deal
Helena Wasserman – The biggest bombshells in the PIC report, which is absolutely scathing of Dan Matjila
And if reporters not in the employ of Survé differed completely with Senekal de Wet, Dlamini and Mdluli about the conclusions reached by the Mpati Commission, how convinced by the Independent Media reporting were the civil service pensioners whose quality of life in their twilight years will depend on the profitability of the Government Employees Pension Fund?
So unconvinced by the exoneration claims in the articles are the 50 000 members of the Association for Monitoring and Advocacy of Government Pensions (AMAGP) that they have called for the prosecution of Iqbal Survé and the seizure of his assets.
A similar call was previously made by the South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU) on behalf of its 800 000 members in 22 affiliated trade unions.
The Democratic Alliance also repudiated Independent Media’s ‘false claims’ of Mpati Commission exoneration and called for prosecution.
Furthermore, the damning findings of the Mpati Commission were also welcomed by the PIC board, which must have listened with dismay and anger as Survé told the Commission that, while he was refusing to pay back the original PIC loan, he was nevertheless servicing the loans of his Chinese funders in China, a country where media freedom does not exist.
What is also significant – Senekal de Wet, Dlamini and Mdluli are best placed to explain this – is that the markets and the JSE are equally unconvinced by their Mpati Commission exoneration fables.
For fear of suffering reputational harm and financial loss, two banks, ABSA and FNB, have severed their ties with companies linked to Survé. His auditors, BDO, no longer wish to be associated with him and Sasol, AYO’s biggest client has withdrawn from an agreement with it. Furthermore he is no longer represented by Webber Wentzel, one of the most respected legal firms in the country (and before them it was ENS) and the local branch of BT Telecoms has also headed for the exit.
My subjective sense, given what has transpired since the scandal-plagued Sekunjalo takeover in 2013 and the bizarre personal attacks on rival media company owners and rival media companies thereafter, is that that there might have been two factors at play in motivating Senekal de Wet, Mdluli and Dlamini to disseminate these falsehoods:
Fear
The fear that, in a company where, as Siphiwe Nodwele testified at the Mpati Commission, the company owner dictates news coverage, they would suffer the same fate as Alide Dasnois and Wally Mbhele if they did not comply. The disturbing treatment of columnist Azad Essa would only have exacerbated such fears.
Hope
With the hopelessly-insolvent Independent Media having cut their salaries by 40% and shifted them onto the AYO payroll, they might have hoped that, by propagating the myth of Mpati Commission exoneration of Survé and Matjila, their personal financial situation might improve. Past experience has shown that both Senekal de Wet and Piet Rampedi were employed after writing obsequious articles praising Survé and Mdluli was appointed editor of the Daily News after writing the articles claiming Mpati Commission exoneration and attacking his employer’s critics and rival media companies – see here and here and here and here and here and here.
This raises a fundamental question about the processes and policies that prevail in Survé’s newsrooms: why did the sub-editors pass the evidence-free Mpati Commission report ‘exoneration’ articles for publication?
The answer is provided in the book Paper Tiger by former Independent Media editors, Alide Dasnois and Chris Whitfield – the ethical news room staff were, from the beginning of the Sekunjalo takeover in late 2013, hounded out of the company or retrenched to facilitate a situation in which the company owner, his family and friends feature in his newspapers virtually every week – a step unprecedented in South African media history.
Fake news reporting
In a recent article, amaBhugane’s Dewald van Rensburg – citing court papers – alleges that Matjila and Survé colluded to ensure that the PIC would never be able to reclaim the loan which facilitated the purchase of the Independent Media titles in 2013. If this claim is not true, provable and in the public interest, then it is clearly defamatory. I can, however, find no reports by Senekal de Wet, Mdluli and Dlamini challenging the essence of this article. Why?
For the past eight years, Independent Media’s sordid reporting and fake news has brought South African journalism into disrepute with, most recently, the biologically-impossible Tembisa Ten claims by Piet Rampedi inviting international and local ridicule.
This unethical reporting has, since 2013, been made a matter of record by former employees – see here and here and here and here and here and by SANEF – see here and here. And by the SA Press Council – see here and here and here – and by the Satchwell commission of inquiry into unethical journalism and by readers – see here and here and here.
What has further undermined media credibility locally was the apartheid-era Stratcom-type funding personally organised by Arthur Fraser to promote the Zuma faction of the ANC.
The ostensible reason for Dan Matjila’s investment of supposedly-sacrosanct pension funds in a dying industry – getting a safe return for the GEPF – will never be realised. Matjila’s largesse has, however, provided the ‘other Mandela doctor’ with a life of opulence which must be envied by Sekunjalo pensioners who have seen the company – led by an ‘ardent philanthropist’ – cut their post-retirement medical aid contributions by 50 % while nevertheless offering a million rand to support non-existent babies.
Unchallenged article
It goes without saying that lying and ethical journalism are irreconcilable concepts and that liars should have no place in the profession.
We don’t know whether Senekal de Wet, Dlamini and Mdluli lied about the Mpati Commission totally exonerating their employer and Matjila of their own volition or whether, as, Siphiwe Nodwele testified at the Commission hearings, they were simply following orders.
The irony is that their lies were irredeemably exposed by the litigation threats of the very people they were trying to protect.
The announcements by Survé and Matjila that they intend taking the Mpati Commission’s excoriating condemnation of their conduct on legal review poses an intractable problem for Senekal de Wet who, in 2018, published an article calling for unethical and fake news to be criminalised. Will she be laying charges against herself and Piet Rampedi?
And what of the ‘accountability’ which the company’s internal ombud, Yogas Nair, promised earlier this year?
If senior executives of a media company escape sanction for palpably misleading the public in articles which falsely claim exoneration for their employer in a situation involving hundreds of millions of rands of supposedly sacrosanct pension fund money, would she not be honour-bound to resign in protest simply to protect her own justifiable reputation as a journalist of integrity? She needs to ask a fundamental question in the context of the ‘exoneration’ lies – are Senekal de Wet, Mdluli and Dlamini deserving of public trust and, if not, should she not publicly distance herself from such conduct?
Gone rogue
Commenting on the ‘Tembisa Ten’ debacle, Anton Harber wrote: “So the problem goes beyond Rampedi and the Pretoria News. One of our largest media groups has gone rogue, throwing journalism principles out of the window, appointing key people without professional judgement or integrity and is now heading for the trash heap.”
The Sekunjalo Independent Media tragedy continues to unfold, continues to claim victims – a matter of profound public interest given the vital role that ethical journalism plays in buttressing democracy and the fact that, as AMAGP has pointed out, the Government Employees Pension Fund will never see a return on the monies invested in Iqbal Survé-linked companies by Dan Matjila.
Where, when and how will it end?
* Opinions expressed in posts published on The Media Online are not necessarily those of Arena Africa or the editor but contribute to the diversity of voices in South Africa.
Ed Herbst is a retired journalist and media commentator.
