Synoptic approach to justice needed

Eusebius McKaiser. File picture: Jason Boud

Eusebius McKaiser. File picture: Jason Boud

Published Jul 18, 2016

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A comprehensive analysis of our democratic backsliding across society is crucial to fighting the rot, writes Eusebius McKaiser.

We are likelier to approximate a just South Africa if active citizens adopt a synoptic approach to justice rather than slavishly favouring one tactic over another.

By a synoptic approach I mean that a complex range of strategies and tactics must be combined to build institutions that can help us achieve a more just society.

Take, for example, activism that is aimed at getting the public broadcaster, the SABC, to fulfil its vital democratic mandate. A handful of journalists, and some civil society leaders, have protested against poor editorial decisions taken by the broadcaster.

Court cases have been initiated to uphold the labour and constitutional rights of SABC employees, as well as the public’s right to access accurate information about our world through the public broadcaster, as it is legally mandated to deliver.

But essentially the activism has come across as being about a narrow labour rights matter, and a bunfight between commercial media and the public broadcaster, perhaps motivated by an interest in stealing each other’s viewers, readers and listeners.

In reality, however, there are granular and fairly obvious connections between the SABC and every other state institution that is a site of looting, mismanagement and turf wars between political factions from the governing tripartite alliance.

The public can be forgiven for not quite comprehending this because the tactics used by civil society have been narrow: legal activism combined with media peer criticism of the SABC, essentially.

A wider range of strategies and tactics must be chosen. First, and the easiest to get right, is that activists and journalists must use a wider lens through which to narrate the story of SABC implosion. The connections must be drawn between democracy, and the purpose and functioning of the broadcaster.

It’s a tactical error to foreground, for example, the SABC when, fuller truth be told, it is really SA Inc vs SABC that we are watching unfold, and participating in as active citizens, rather than a circumscribed battle for workplace rights.

We should plug the SABC story into the more well-known story of state institutional degradation, political and corporate capture, and unethical leadership in politics and business.

One can acknowledge that each state-owned enterprise’s pillaging has different consequences for society, but a comprehensive analysis of how they all form part of a grand narrative of democratic backsliding across our society, is crucial.

Only then will the public sentiment in favour of protesters’ demands for structural change at the SABC probably become more noticeable and visceral.

Recall, for example, the instructive case study of activism in relation to the South African Protection of State Information Bill. Initially, many civil society organisations, including the Right2Know campaign, made the error of focusing on how the space for journalism will be closed down if that bill became law. That claim was true, for sure, but the more compelling pushback against that bill started when communities appeared before Parliament, expressing in their own words why the bill is a direct and material threat to their quality of lives.

The breakthrough wasn’t rocket science: if the state stops the free flow of information about the state, based on spurious legal power to classify essential information, ordinary citizens will not be able to hold the state accountable because they simply won’t have a proper clue about what the state is up to.

Corruption can then continue unabated and inevitably the worst off in that scenario won’t be professional journalists chucked in jail for breaking a bad law, but destitute citizens deprived of credible information that they can act on politically.

Similarly, activism about the structural and organisational weaknesses at the SABC must focus on communities, and help explain to and convince the average Joe that this isn’t a parochial matter but one connected, in the end, to the very quality of life that is possible, or not, in a South Africa in which the public broadcaster is politically manipulated.

Finally, it is crucial to supplement legal activism with political activism. If chief operating officer Hlaudi Motsoeneng decided today to never take an editorial decision but to leave them to assignments editors and news editors on the newsdesk, there would still be a problem at the SABC.

If the COO agrees that no editorial policy should ever be couched in absolute terms, because that is too rigid and would amount to pre-publication censorship, there would still be a problem at the SABC.

Why? Because a politically pliant functionary in the newsroom - call her, for sake of argument, Sophie - can follow the formal prescriptions of Independent Communications Authority of South Africa while still exercising discretion with scant regard for political neutrality.

Activists must become politically savvy and also fight these battles, as messy as it will get, inside the political arena and not just within the courts of law.

* Eusebius McKaiser is the best-selling author of A Bantu In My Bathroom and Could I Vote DA? A Voter’s Dilemma. His new book - Run, Racist, Run: Journeys Into The Heart Of Racism - is now available nationwide, and online through Amazon.

** The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Independent Media.

THE STAR

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