The Daily Friend shares below a piece written by the IRR’s Head of Strategic Communications, Hermann Pretorius, originally submitted to the Daily Maverick on 14 July in response to DM writer Rebecca Davis’s article of 12 July, EXCLUSIVE: The DA MP, Tony Leon’s lobbying firm and the SIM card law. As the following indicates, the IRR was informed on 22 July that the DM had “decided not to publish the piece at this time”.
The note, from a faceless “Daily Maverick Opinion Desk” and addressed to nobody in particular, reads:
Good day,
Thank you for your submission to Daily Maverick.
After editorial review, we’ve decided not to publish the piece at this time. This decision reflects our current editorial priorities and does not imply a judgment on your broader work.
We appreciate your interest in contributing to Daily Maverick and thank you for taking the time to submit.
Warm regards,
Daily Maverick Opinion Desk
There the matter might have ended, the story seeming to have receded somewhat from public attention, and the subject now possibly requiring a fresh approach. But we felt that changed with the appearance on Politicsweb on Wednesday of a piece written by Paul Boughey, CEO of Resolve Communications, under the headline: The reply the DM refused to publish.
In his preamble, Boughey writes:
“On 15 July, Daily Maverick published an opinion piece by Rebecca Davis ‘Unpacking the defences and deflections around the Resolve Communications controversy’; examining the public affairs and related work of our firm. It was the latest in a series of prominent pieces the publication has run on the subject over recent weeks.
We wrote the response set out below in a manner that engages directly and on the facts of Ms Davis’s arguments — accepting what is fair, including her rejection of the “State Capture” characterisation, and contesting what we believe is not. We submitted it to Daily Maverick for publication, and they declined to carry it.
That is Daily Maverick’s prerogative, and we assert no entitlement to its pages. But where a publication has given an allegation sustained prominence, we believe its readers are entitled to know that the subject’s considered response was offered — and refused — and to read that response and judge it for themselves. – Resolve Communications”
If the story has in any way receded from public attention, what ought to be hauled back into the light is the proposition that candid argumentation is the sole mark of an authentic and unafraid public conversation, and that pretending otherwise comes at a cost, to society, to its politics and to its media.
Here, then, is Hermann Pretorius’s offering of 14 July which the Daily Maverick Opinion Desk deemed to not match “our current editorial priorities”. – The Editor
Rebecca Davis’s ‘exclusive’ is insinuation masquerading as investigation
Rebecca Davis’s latest “exclusive” (EXCLUSIVE: The DA MP, Tony Leon’s lobbying firm and the SIM card law)purports to uncover a troubling relationship between DA MP Kabelo Kgobisa-Ngcaba, her former employer Resolve Communications, and companies advocating reforms to South Africa’s dysfunctional SIM-card registration system.
The story, in want of a better word, can be summarised quite easily. Before entering Parliament in June 2024, Kgobisa-Ngcaba worked at Resolve, a communications and public-affairs firm whose clients have included companies concerned with SIM-card packaging and security. Once in Parliament, she asked a series of questions about the enforcement of the Regulation of Interception of Communications and Provision of Communication-Related Information Act, commonly known as RICA, wrote publicly about the problem, spoke to journalists and proposed reforms which included better identity verification and tamper-proof packaging.
Davis arranges these facts into a laboured chronology, decorates them with ominous transitions, and repeatedly invites the reader to suspect that Kgobisa-Ngcaba’s parliamentary work was somehow being directed by commercial interests. What Davis does not provide is evidence that this sinister stuff happened.
She gives no communication showing that Resolve instructed Kgobisa-Ngcaba to ask a parliamentary question. There is no evidence that a Resolve client dictated her policy position. There is no payment, benefit, promise, secret meeting, concealed agreement or witness account. There is no identified breach of civic ethics, parliamentary rules, party rules or the law. There is no evidence that Kgobisa-Ngcaba misrepresented a commercial instruction as an independently held political view.
After a few thousand odd words, the only thing Davis has proved is that Kgobisa-Ngcaba knew something about an industry before she entered Parliament and continued to take an interest in an issue with which she was familiar after she became an MP.
That’s it. That is supposed to be a scandal.
Yet, the far more mundane explanation, though one less likely to attract clicks, is one Davis never seriously considers: that Kabelo Kgobisa-Ngcaba MP understands a specific problem of policy, believes the reform she advocates would improve public safety, and has used legitimate instruments available to an MP to advance that argument openly.
This explanation, perhaps unfortunately for those relishing at the easy slander of an impressive young DA MP, requires no conspiracy, no hidden hand, and no reputational destruction. It is also consistent with everything Kgobisa-Ngcaba has done publicly.
Kgobisa-Ngcaba entered Parliament with a legal education, experience at Lawyers for Human Rights, political research experience and several years in communications and public affairs. She did not arrive as an empty vessel waiting to be handed a portfolio briefing. She entered Parliament as almost exactly what ordinary people want their MPs to be: able to accomplish the three-part task of representing voters, a party, and her own sense of what ought to be done.
She came with experience of how government, legislation, business, civil society and public persuasion intersect. Daily Maverick itself previously published her arguments on employment equity, the National Health Insurance project, and freedom of expression, while her News24 opinion piece on RICA reform set out her case publicly under her own name. This opinion piece is, at least according to Davis evidence not of an ability to make an argument, but of nothing short of state capture.
Her published writing over several years reveals a politician with recognisable and consistent concerns. Her work is well worth reading. She’s argued in Daily Maverick against corporate capitulation to online outrage in the controversy involving Nando’s and Gareth Cliff. She’s argued that the Employment Equity Amendment Act would deepen racial regulation without addressing unemployment. She warned South Africans about the closing opportunity to challenge the NHI Bill. These subjects are wide-ranging and substantive. They concern free expression, labour law, racial policy, healthcare, constitutional process, and public accountability.
Her RICA advocacy therefore did not emerge from the conduct of someone incapable of developing an independent political position. In actual fact, and to her credit, it came from a person with an established record of analysing legislation, explaining its consequences and arguing for reform in public.
Davis’s Candace Owens-like approach of using laughably ominous-sounding ‘questions’ to stoke outrage, invites the reader to treat Kgobisa-Ngcaba’s relevant experience as inherently contaminating. Yet, industry knowledge is precisely one of the things Parliament so badly needs.
Our national legislature is hardly suffering from an excess of MPs who understand technical problems, can identify regulatory weaknesses, formulate precise questions, and communicate their proposed remedies to the public. Parliament is too often populated by representatives who arrive without specialist knowledge, repeat slogans supplied by party offices, sit silently through committee proceedings, and contribute little to the development of policy.
Kgobisa-Ngcaba appears to represent the opposite tendency. She is a clear thinker, a capable communicator and an MP who arrived with enough practical experience to know where to look, what to ask and how to convert a technical regulatory problem into an intelligible public argument. All of this makes her an asset to Parliament and to her country in her role as an MP.
Davis, however, treats competence itself as suspicious. The reader is supposed to gasp in shock over the fact that Kgobisa-Ngcaba asked nine questions about a subject. She persisted after receiving answers she regarded as incomplete. She wrote an opinion piece. She participated in media interviews. She proposed identifiable reforms. The cumulative picture is of an MP pursuing an issue with unusual clarity and purpose. In Davis’s telling, parliamentary persistence becomes evidence of state capture.
Her “exclusive” even presents Kgobisa-Ngcaba’s continued interest after moving from the justice committee to the correctional services committee as cause for suspicion, while acknowledging that MPs are entitled to ask questions across portfolios. Parliament’s own records currently list her as a member of the Portfolio Committee on Correctional Services, where her questioning has extended well beyond RICA to prison escapes, corruption, contraband, infrastructure, bail absconders, repeat offending and unnatural deaths in custody.
This broader record is important because it demolishes the attempt to portray her as a parliamentary delivery mechanism for a single commercial interest. She has used questions and committee work to expose the R1-billion cost of deficient prison fencing, the number of parolees who reoffended, the scale of bail abscondment, the weakness of prison-escape prevention measures and the failure to impose meaningful consequences after deaths in custody.
In one committee exchange, faced with a vague departmental presentation on prison security, she cut through the bureaucratic language with a simple question: was this merely “a plan to make a plan”? That is the language of someone trying to establish whether the executive has produced an actionable programme rather than another recital of principles. This is what effective parliamentary oversight looks like. MPs ask questions, test official answers, expose data, identify contradictions, write publicly and seek support for reforms. Those actions take place in view of Parliament, journalists, interested industries, civil society and the electorate.
Even Davis has to admit that public opinion pieces and published parliamentary questions are rather unconvincing instruments for a secret programme of state capture.
State capture flourishes through concealment: private instructions, undisclosed payments, manipulated appointments, procurement interference, threats, favours and the covert bending of state power. Kgobisa-Ngcaba has pursued her argument in signed articles, recorded parliamentary questions and attributed media interviews. Her proposed reform can be examined, challenged, rejected or adopted on its merits. That is the battle of ideas being pursued with clarity and purpose.
Now, Davis is entitled to scrutinise the argument. She could investigate whether tamper-proof packaging would work, whether it would impose disproportionate costs, whether biometric registration would create privacy risks, whether international evidence supports the proposal, or whether alternative reforms would be more effective. Those would be useful journalistic questions because they would help the public assess the policy. Instead, she constructs an accusation she cannot prove. Instead of investigation, she dishes up a tawdry dish of derivative sludge.
The technique is cheap but, sadly, effective. Place a former employer beside a present policy position. Identify companies which could benefit from the reform. Emphasise similarities in language. Mention that media coverage appeared within a short period. Record that some questions were not answered. End with the melodramatic observation that a general denial was removed from a revised statement.
At every stage, the reader is nudged towards a conclusion which Davis herself lacks the evidence to make. Her dud of a bombshell is saturated with phrases such as “may complicate”, “may suggest”, “could give rise to the impression”, “one intriguing detail” and “this happened to match”. These rhetorical finger clicks perform the essential work of the smear. They intend suspicion to be created without any evidentiary burden ever being met.
Even Davis’s account of the RICA issue contains facts which make Kgobisa-Ngcaba’s concern eminently reasonable. A ministerial response obtained through her questioning indicated that 61.82% of extortion cases in the relevant data involved unregistered SIM cards. Davis dwells on the absence of similar recorded figures for several other crimes and presents Kgobisa-Ngcaba’s scepticism about data collection as another suspicious parallel with industry messaging. Yet questioning whether a recorded figure of precisely zero reflects reality or deficient data collection is hardly irrational in a state whose information systems are notoriously fragmented. The parliamentary question generated useful information about a serious crime problem, and the MP pressed for greater clarity when the remaining answers appeared implausibly absolute.
One may disagree with her proposed remedy. One may argue that the evidence establishes a problem without establishing that packaging regulation would solve it. One may support stronger disclosure rules for lobbyists and MPs. None of this converts Kgobisa-Ngcaba’s clear public advocacy into anything approaching misconduct.
Nor does the existence of a commercial interest discredit a policy argument. Companies generally know the sectors in which they operate. They frequently advocate rules which correspond with their expertise and their financial interests. Their arguments must be tested rigorously, but commercial interest alone does not make an argument false, and agreement with a company’s proposal does not make a politician corrupt.
Shamefully, Davis offers no serious evidence that Kgobisa-Ngcaba does not genuinely believe what she has said. She simply declines to entertain that possibility. This is especially cynical given that Daily Maverick has itself published Kgobisa-Ngcaba’s opinion writing. The publication was evidently content to present her as a legitimate participant in public debate when she was arguing about employment equity, NHI and freedom of expression. Now, without producing evidence of an improper instruction or benefit, it treats her ability to argue coherently about a regulatory issue as potential evidence of something sinister.
It is also worth noting how little attention Davis gives to Kgobisa-Ngcaba’s personal agency. In Davis’s scandalous narrative, the companies have interests, Tony Leon has interests, Resolve has interests, the DA has interests, journalists have sources, and media campaigns exist. Yet Kgobisa-Ngcaba herself, someone of admirable ability and intellect, is treated almost as an intellectual nullity, incapable of encountering an issue through her professional experience, forming a view and carrying that view into public office. It is both unfair and insulting.
Professional experience does not deprive a public representative of independent judgement. In fact, it can and often does furnish that judgement. A lawyer entering Parliament may pursue legal reform. A doctor may focus on healthcare. A teacher may arrive with strong views about education. A former public-affairs professional may understand the weaknesses of a regulatory regime and the manner in which policy proposals are developed, communicated and contested. The proper question is whether the MP disclosed relevant interests, received improper benefits, acted under concealed instruction or abused public power. Davis proves none of these things. And it’s clear from her compulsion to conjure ghoulish little beasties of verdagmaking that she knows this.
Her “exclusive” is ultimately an affront to anything resembling journalism. It is cheap, cynical, and deliberate. One might expect an election year to give rise to political attacks on the DA from rival parties. Politicians are in the business of taking the most damaging available interpretation of an opponent’s conduct and presenting it to voters. Coming from someone claiming the label of journalist, it just makes the skin crawl.
Journalism earns its authority by separating what can be proved from what can merely be imagined. It subjects powerful people to scrutiny, but it also observes the elementary integrity of evidence. Davis abandons that discipline while retaining the posture and prestige of an investigation. She wants the reputational force of an accusation without the responsibility of proving one. The result is a gutter-level smear by insinuation.
Kgobisa-Ngcaba’s actual record presents a very different picture: an articulate and serious MP, equipped by her previous work to understand complex policy questions, willing to use Parliament’s mechanisms persistently, and able to explain her conclusions in public. Her arguments remain open to criticism. Her proposals should be debated. Her judgement should be assessed, as the judgement of every MP should be. Yet, what cannot reasonably be done, at least not by anyone claiming journalistic intent, is to take expertise, clarity and industry knowledge, place them beneath a cloud of insinuation and pretend that suspicion itself amounts to a finding.
There is one personal disclosure worth making. I have met Kabelo Kgobisa-Ngcaba exactly once. We spent only a few minutes together, and that brief interaction is not the basis of my view. What I have admired for far longer is her public record as a writer and communicator. Long before she entered Parliament, she had established herself as someone capable of taking difficult policy questions, thinking them through carefully and making a coherent, persuasive case in public. Whether writing on labour policy, healthcare, freedom of expression or constitutional questions, she has consistently demonstrated an ability that is surprisingly rare in South African politics: the ability to argue rather than merely assert.
We also happen to share a conviction about what ultimately lifts societies out of poverty. Both of us believe in the fundamentals of a pro-growth society: freer markets over state intervention, enterprise over bureaucracy, opportunity over dependency, and the simple proposition that prosperity is created when individuals are empowered rather than managed. That does not mean I would agree with every conclusion she reaches. It does mean I recognise in her someone who approaches public policy as a serious contest of ideas rather than a vehicle for slogans.
Perhaps that is precisely what makes this article so shameless. Davis asks readers to view Kgobisa-Ngcaba’s expertise, experience and intellectual consistency not as the qualities one should hope to find in a Member of Parliament, but as grounds for suspicion. I see them as exactly the opposite. They are among the reasons she belongs there.
There is one final point that makes Davis’s wily goose chase particularly dispiriting. South Africa is living through a period of profound national crisis. Economic growth has stalled. Millions remain unemployed. Municipal collapse has become routine. Basic public services are failing communities across the country. The country is digesting the deeply troubling evidence emerging from the Madlanga Commission. Corruption, state failure and institutional decay remain among the defining challenges of our age.
Against this backdrop, with South Africans shortly to make important decisions of local government, it frankly boggles the mind that Rebecca Davis considered this worth pursuing as a major political exposé: not evidence of corruption, not evidence of state capture, not evidence of procurement manipulation, illicit enrichment or abuse of public office. Instead, salacious insinuation pretending to be serious investigation.
[Image: Daily Friend]
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