Culture of self-censorship affects big business too

01 Oct 2013 | Tony Leon | Original Publication:  BDlive

Self-censorship is found in Corporate South Africa too and, on occasion, business leaders speak out, but in the main keep their heads down and hope for the best, writes Tony Leon

GARLANDED with honours, showered with honorary degrees and heaped with international gongs, including a Nobel Peace Prize, Nelson Mandela is not exactly short of acclamation at home and abroad. But in retelling his storied presidency, it is easy to overlook a notorious, much less merited award he once received. Back in February 1998, the South African edition of porn magazine Hustler indecorously named the great Madiba, "Asshole of the Month."

According to Mandela’s authorised biographer Anthony Sampson, then deputy minister of home affairs Lindiwe Sisulu criticised the magazine as "vile, outrageous and obscene" and considered, apparently, banning it. Mandela, in contrast, "laughed the matter off’’ and said, somewhat oxymoronically, that the magazine should use its "own sense of morality and judgment". In the midst of the fuss, he surprised his director-general, Jakes Gerwel, by asking him impishly: "Have you seen this month’s Hustler?"

Fifteen years on, Mandela’s aversion to censoring anything appears to have been replaced by a self-censorship that invades some of the very spaces that under apartheid manned the ramparts of free expression in a very unfree society. Despite the generous provisions for freedom of expression under our constitution, weekend reports suggest "a politically sensitive work of art" was banned by organisers of last week’s Joburg Art Fair. The offending item, according to the Sunday Times, was Ayanda Mabulu’s painting, which depicts, in the wake of Marikana, "a laughing President Jacob Zuma holding the leash of a dog that is threatening to bite a kneeling miner’’. Others in the tableau are Cyril Ramaphosa and a laughing (in itself unusual) Queen Elizabeth who shares a veranda with Prince Charles and the African National Congress logo.

Ross Douglas, one of the fair’s organisers, said the artwork was removed because of "sensitivities" around government sponsorship of the art fair, which he feared would be jeopardised by the display. Only the forceful response of internationally acclaimed Johannesburg photographer David Goldblatt, who removed his works in protest, led to the ban being rescinded. Liza Essers, director of the Goodman Gallery, which housed The Spear last year, and at least had the excuse of mass marches and vandalism to force her hand on removing that painting, noted: "As a result of The Spear saga … a culture of self-censorship has become increasingly ubiquitous in the South African art world."

There is something paradoxical about the instances of self-censorship, by no means confined to arts and culture, and the exuberance of often extreme antigovernment and deeply personal attacks on the president — both of which feature in South Africa today. The rule of thumb appears to be: the further away from the government and the less dependent on it for your fortunes, the more hyped, even on occasion exaggerated, the criticism. Think here of the egregious Julius Malema’s depiction of the government as "worse than the apartheid regime". This covers the opposition, much of the nongovernmental organisation and media community (with some notable exceptions) and many international investors.

Conversely, the more enmeshed with the government and dependent on its favour, the more muted the response even when vital interests are at stake. Corporate South Africa uneasily straddles this divide, despite a torrent of market-unfriendly measures coming down the pipeline. On occasion, business leaders speak out and even break down in tears as Anglo’s Mark Cutifani recently and memorably did. But in the main, they keep heads down and hope for the best. It’s reminiscent of the great scene in the movie Annie Hall. Woody Allen and Diane Keaton are on a date and mouthing onscreen the usual platitudes of courtship. However, below the scene appear subtitles which depict what each of them is actually thinking. We are witnessing many Annie Hall moments in the business-government dialogue.

A contrast came from Britain last week. Labour Party leader Ed Miliband decided to offer up some red-in-tooth-and-claw anti-big business sentiment to pacify his supporters. Miliband used his conference speech to take aim at and decry the country’s energy firms, deeply unpopular with voters because of ever-rising gas and electricity bills. He announced that on entering office, he would price control and freeze all gas and electricity prices for 20 months after the next election.

There was an instant and angry response from the big six energy companies targeted. One of them announced such a move would make it unviable to continue to provide supplying energy in Britain. A second predicted blackouts and another decried Miliband’s policy as "economic vandalism" and "insane".

A head-on collision between big business and the possible next prime minister might be troubling for some, but it certainly deepens the debate. And neither side has any doubt what the one thinks of the other.

 

• Leon is the author of The Accidental Ambassador (Pan Macmillan). Follow him on Twitter: @TonyLeonSA OR on Facebook: facebook.com/TonyLeonSA

 

 

 

Pistorius is a metaphor for our own national story

26 Feb 2013 | Tony Leon | Original Publication:  BDlive

Oscar Pistorius’s fall from dizzying heights to the precipice of criminal infamy is a metaphor for our national story, writes Tony Leon

THE late, great South African lawyer, Ernie Wentzel, had an arresting turn of phrase. He opined in 1981 that the problem with being an advocate was that "there are too many magistrates who think they are judges, and some judges who ought to be magistrates".

As I was drawn into the Oscar Pistorius bail hearing, I couldn’t help think that Wentzel’s observation had, happily for our international reputation, been inverted, with the truly magisterial judgment of Desmond Nair in Pretoria on Friday. For all the cruel light the shoddy forensic work of the former investigating officer, Hilton Botha, had shone on the inadequacies of our policing, along came the chief magistrate of Pretoria with a closely reasoned and impeccably researched ruling to repair the battered image of our justice system.

Of much lower media wattage, on the same day as Nair’s ruling, was the decision of the Judicial Service Commission to exclude Jeremy Gauntlett from the Constitutional Court short list yet again. Doubtless, Gauntlett can now reflect on the observation about Oscar Wilde that he "would lose his best friend for an epigram". His witty put-down of Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng along the lines that, unlike the latter, he did not feel that God had called him to judicial service, was not drawn from How to Win Friends and Influence People, the Dale Carnegie bible on getting ahead. It was also strange that while Gauntlett’s intellectual independence is unassailable, his "campaign" for office roped in nominations from opposition leaders Helen Zille and Mangosuthu Buthelezi. I can just imagine how uncomfortable some would have felt had a nominee for judicial office included a nomination from, say, African National Congress secretary-general Gwede Mantashe. Meanwhile, given some of the strange appointments to our bench recently, and some of the more startling omissions from it, Nair should be considered for an early elevation.

But all of this sits low in the cumulus clouds of national and international attention. Pistorius alone inhabits the stratosphere — and the world is drawn in, with voyeuristic fascination, at our home-grown combination of the OJ Simpson trial and the death of Princess Diana. You also cannot but contemplate, as Pistorius moved in less than a year from the pinnacle of Olympic achievement to the pit of the Pretoria Magistrate’s Court, that lurking inside his fall from a great and dizzying height to the precipice of criminal infamy is, less dramatically as well, a sort of metaphor for our national story.

Last weekend, I completed a fellowship in the heady atmosphere of the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies, one of SA’s most impressive (and most hidden) centres of thought excellence. Among a firmament of academic stars in residence was Prof Bo Rothstein of the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He is an international expert on "the quality of governance" and its baleful twin, corruption. He disarmingly put it: "I don’t have expertise about the South African situation, but I can say that the quality of governance and the absence of corruption in certain African countries are higher than it is in countries like Greece and Italy."

He recounted at a seminar that a US student had expressed surprise that a Scandinavian studying corruption was akin to a "nun running a strip club". However, the observation he did offer about our national projection abroad, a la the morphing of Pistorius from hero to zero, is that there has been a steady depletion of SA’s moral capital in the world. He noted that, like a successful corporation, if a country has prodigious amounts of what Harvard professor Joseph Nye termed "soft power" — or the power of its example rather than the hard stuff, such as the example of its power — then "you should be careful not to diminish it". And we certainly have fallen hard in recent times.

Rothstein has certainly not studied our National Development Plan (NDP) and doubtless ministers Lindiwe Sisulu and Trevor Manuel, who last week championed its key recommendation of creating (after 20 locust years) a professional, corruption-free public service, are unaware of Rothstein’s presence in SA. But the three of them are actually in agreement. And so is the NDP.

Rothstein cites the example of that most life-essential delivery of all, the provision of drinkable water. He notes: "A conservative estimate is that 14,000 people die every day in the developing world from water- and sanitation-related illnesses." Yet the shortage here is neither an absence of engineering technical solutions, but rather corruption and "other forms of bad governance".

Given that the Pistorius case sucked up most of the media oxygen, President Jacob Zuma’s announcement that the NDP will now be front and centre of all government policy-making received little attention. But if this wish translates into real reforms, then we could climb slowly again up the summit of achievement and admiration.

• Follow Tony Leon on Twitter: @TonyLeonSA