“Conducted in parallel with the extremely dangerous phenomenon of ‘state capture’, the process of consolidating our democracy is endangered by “media capture” and the incremental obliteration of critical voices.” – Helen Zille in an open letter to Dr Iqbal Survé in January 2015.
“Around 2010 the (Gupta) family approached the ANC with a proposal to establish a newspaper and television channel. At the time the ANC had an interest in the diversification of the media in the country and on that basis, the proposal was entertained.
“The establishment of ANN7 and The New Age was in our view such an opportunity. In fact, the name of the newspaper was proposed by ANC officials after a well-known struggle newspaper of the 1950s.”
Gwede Mantashe at the Zondo Commission Cebelihle Bhengu 15/4/2021
Gwede Mantashe’s acknowledgement before the Zondo Commission that the ANC had fully supported the Gupta’s media capture initiative is an important one. Through the ANC’s control of NGOs such as Eskom and the SABC, that support was both monetary and utilised the most influential media voice in the country, the SABC.
What he did not mention was that the ANC gave the same back-up to the acquisition by another of its supporters, Iqbal Survé, of the largest group of English newspapers in the country, Independent Media, even though it was obvious from the start that this would be a loss-making project which would be detrimental to the long term interests of those working for the State.
Anton Harber has analysed this nefarious endeavour in an article which documents the media capture by the ANC to which Helen Zille referred in her letter to Survé, cited above.
It was headlined ‘The New Age experiment: Government’s attempt to control the media has done industry no favours’.
At about the same time as the rise of the Gupta media group, Cape Town doctor and businessman Iqbal Survé took over the Independent Group, with political backing from the ANC, and financial backing from the ANC’s Chinese allies and the PIC, which invests state pension fund money.
These developments signalled an important change in the ANC approach to the media. Having tried to use political and financial pressure to knock the private media into shape, and being frustrated, they had turned to the law, proposing a statutory media tribunal to oversee the print media and secrecy laws that would restrict the work of investigative reporters. When that met resistance, the new approach was to assist their friends and allies – the Guptas and Survés – to take control of significant national media interests. Those who criticised this approach were branded as “anti-ANC” or “anti-transformation”.
It was no coincidence that it was at this time that the ANC took its most direct control over the SABC and it became little more than a crude mouthpiece of the Zuma presidency.
Another element of the ANC’s media capture project unfolded before the Zondo commission when it heard details of ‘Project Wave’. This, it is alleged, saw Arthur Fraser personally direct a R20 million backhander from a State Security Agency (SSA) slush fund into the coffers of the Iqbal Survé–linked wire service, the African News Agency (ANA).
Muldergate scandal
This was reminiscent of how the National Party funded The Citizen during the Muldergate scandal.
The goal, apparently, was to train SSA operatives on how to infiltrate newsrooms of rival media companies and to promote the pro-Zuma faction and anti-CR17 and anti-Pravin Gordhan narrative (see here and here and here. ) This, on behalf of Survé’s political allies and those with whom he is now aligned, is already a pervasive element of Sekunjalo Independent Media (SIM) coverage – see here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here.
The parallels between this campaign and the enormously damaging proxy vendetta waged against the University of Cape Town’s former Vice Chancellor, Dr Max Price, using the Cape Times are obvious.
To me, Fraser’s hush money inducement had an uncomfortable apartheid-era security police resonance. Is it not analogous to what happened when the security police Stratcom unit infiltrated Gerard Ludi into the Rand Daily Mail newsroom, resulting in July 1964 in the arrest, solitary confinement, incarceration and subsequent flight into exile of Terry Bell?
The Project Wave revelations at the Zondo Commission were ironic precisely because Iqbal Survé’s editors were all forced to carry front page articles denigrating the country’s most respected journalists with the defamatory ‘Stratcom’ slur – something without precedent in South Africa’s newspaper history.
In response to ABSA and FNB severing their ties with Iqbal Survé-linked companies for fear of incurring reputational harm, the Association for the Monitoring and Advocacy of Government Pensions (AMAGP) issued a statement decrying the inevitable loss of R5 billion in the disturbing PIC investment in SIM and AYO Technology Solutions.
Pension funds
This has relevance not only to the almost two million government employees and current civil service pensioners whose monthly stop order pension fund deductions are invested by the PIC, but also to you and me, as taxpayers – because government underwrites these pension funds.
SIM banks with Standard, which now confronts a stark yet simple ethical question. Does it endorse and support ethical journalism or not? Or, to sum up it up more succinctly, does it choose principle or profit?
Ethical, good faith journalism died the moment Sekunjalo – with the help of the ANC’s media capture project – took control of the former Argus Group newspapers.
The deliberate evisceration and demolition of this once-respected company and the former SAPA – renamed African News Agency – has been soul-crushing for employees of these companies and for those who once respected their news coverage.
More information will hopefully be forthcoming in a few weeks’ time at the next meeting between the Survê-linked companies and parliament’s Standing Committee on Finance (SCoF).
This will give the PIC an opportunity to respond to the allegations of victimisation – see here and here and here – which Survé and his team made at the last SCoF meeting on 17 March.
Hopefully they will be asked to explain why no other South African media company or media company executive is so beleaguered, so persecuted by ‘dark forces’ and ‘smear campaigns’ and ‘thick white substances’ …and when Survé is going to provide the details of the ‘dirt’ he said he had against the ‘Pravin cabal’ a full 17 months ago.
At the time, MPs from all parties dismissed these allegations as ‘conspiracy theories’ – see here and here and here.
Standard Bank, mulling the Survé-related testimony before both the Mpati and Zondo Commissions and the recent sworn testimony of Gwede Mantashe, will surely follow the proceedings at the next SCoF meeting with both interest and concern.
It should take cognisance of the fact that the ANC’s media capture project – as mentioned by Mantashe in his under-oath testimony at the Zondo Commission – has done this country immense reputational harm.
In its deliberations, Standard Bank will doubtless factor in public perceptions of Iqbal Survé – see here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here.
Disturbing
What has also been disturbing has been the use of SLAPP-litigation threats to intimidate critics, threats which never come to anything – see here and here and here and here and here.
Furthermore, in a country trying to bridge the ethnic divide and heal the divisions of the past, it is imperative that we strive to implement Nelson Mandela’s goal of nation- building through reconciliation, yet Iqbal Survé has never hidden his antipathy in this regard and this is reflected in his newspapers, most particularly the Cape Times when it was edited by Aneez Salie.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
If you like what you have just read, support the Daily Friend