By Feroza Petersen
A few days ago, Daily Maverick associate editor, Ferial Haffajee, launched a petty unwarranted Twitter attack against Sekunjalo Chairman, Dr Iqbal Survé.
In the attack, Haffajee refers to Dr Survé as “this guy”, and then goes on to criticise the communicated 25% short payment of staff resulting from the challenges Independent Media is facing, suggesting that the editors must buy out “the remaining media parts”. Her colleague, Marianne Thamm, was in tow, responding with the video of the christening of Dr Survé’s daughter.
Haffajee’s attack against Survé is unwarranted, personal, petty, putrid, and racist — typical of smear artists.
The media industry and many other sectors have faced severe economic challenges following the devastating Covid-19 pandemic. Many businesses collapsed, and those that survived still face a challenge to recover or sustain their businesses. Many people lost their jobs, families disintegrated, and we have yet to recover from the painful effect.
But Haffajee sees a grand opportunity to feed her sadistic streak and politicise the dire situation newsrooms face.
A 2020 New York Times report titled “News Media Outlets Have Been Ravaged by the Pandemic” stated that “roughly 37,000 workers at news companies in the U.S. have been laid off, been furloughed or had their pay reduced.” South Africa had its fair share of layoffs, with Naspers, Caxton, and other competing media houses shutting down their titles and consequently laying off their staff.
Instead of laying off its staff and kicking them to the UIF queue, the Independent Media was one of the few media houses that held forte, and fought to keep the staff in their jobs. It is not that the economic conditions that led to shutdowns of titles by competitors did not exist for Indy, but the company sacrificed and prioritised its people.
Independent Media was not commended for doing all it could to save people and jobs. If the Independent Media was commended for what it did, Haffajee’s narrative and mainstream attempt to paint Survé as an irresponsible leader would fall flat on its face.
Now let’s get back to Haffajee’s tweet and what she was attempting to achieve. Using old apartheid-style propaganda of “divide and rule”, Haffajee is trying to pit the staff against its leadership, or shareholders. In framing Survé as a leader who “lives large” while his employees are “short-paid”, she wants to agitate and anger the staff.
The Independent Media staff must not fall for the age-old propaganda tactic.
Haffajee cannot hold back her petty hatred or jealousy against Dr Survé. Since her “journalism” career hit the gutters, she has been trying too hard to use Survé as a tool to resuscitate what’s left of her failed career.
Her fall from grace from being in newsrooms of mainstream media titles such as Financial Mail, Mail and Guardian, and City Press to an online propaganda rag is telling.
If Survé was white, Haffajee would not be racist and condescending, calling him “this guy”. Let alone mention his assets as a tool to agitate employees of one of the companies he’s a shareholder in.
When the SABC, Naspers, Caxton, Arena Holdings and other media houses retrenched thousands of workers and cut down titles, we did not see Haffajee tweet fervently about assets of shareholders such as Terry Moolman or Koos Bekker. Her fake ‘care’ or concern for staff is only reserved for Dr Survé.
Reports of Google, Meta, Amazon and other tech companies laying off more than 104,000 employees in the last year went unreported by most South African mainstream. These global companies also have offices and a presence in South Africa.
Microsoft plans to lay off 10,000 employees. But we don’t see journalists using assets of Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates as a tool of agitation. Such pettiness is the reserve of petty propaganda shills such as Haffajee.
The conflation of Dr Survé and the companies he is not operationally responsible for is done on purpose.
Haffajee and the mainstream media invested heavily in propaganda smear against Survé and his companies. Even in the face of economic difficulties, Haffajee and her colleagues went on a propaganda overdrive to see the destruction of the companies.
Now that the piranha is smelling the ‘blood’ of Independent Media, she is gloating, putting up a fake pretence of care about the company staff she smeared and tried to destroy. She does not see the irony at all. The worst was Haffajee even suggesting who should own the company in future.
Haffajee’s employer, the Daily Maverick, and some local media houses were exposed as a nexus of media houses funded by the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) through the State Department-linked non-governmental organisations (NGOs).
The Daily Maverick never refuted Ajit Sing and Roscoe Palm’s exposé titled “Manufacturing consent: How the United States has penetrated South African media”.
Like any company, the Independent Media may face its challenges, but for Haffajee to politicise it is the new low. This is despite the fact that the company always prioritised saving jobs.
Her tweets and bitter hatred of Dr Surve expose how vile and evil she is, including the empire she serves. Propaganda shills and smear artists like Haffajee are so heartless they will relish others’ pain. They will even dance on the corpses of the dead just to fulfil their own sadistic streak.