PRESIDENT ZUMA’S VIEWS ON MEDIA FREEDOM
2015-10-22
PRESIDENT ZUMA’S CELEBRATION OF MEDIA FREEDOM DAY By Dave Steward, Executive Director of the FW de Klerk Foundation President Zuma is understandably unhappy with the
PRESIDENT ZUMA’S CELEBRATION OF MEDIA FREEDOM DAY By Dave Steward, Executive Director of the FW de Klerk Foundation President Zuma is understandably unhappy with the
President Zuma is understandably unhappy with the treatment he receives from the media – and particularly from the print media. He is regularly depicted with a shower emerging from his head. Artists paint him with his genitals exposed. He is castigated for corruption and the media continue to hound him over the expenditure of R246 million on his retirement home.
So, it is not surprising that when he went off text during his recent address to mark Media Freedom Day, the President expressed some emotion.
In his address on 15 October 2015 to the Higher Education Transformation Summit in Durban, Deputy President Ramaphosa made the following statement:
“Though we have made a decisive shift from the fragmented, inefficient and inequitable higher education system of the apartheid era, we still feel its effects. Had the apartheid rulers not been so thorough, so methodical, so malevolent in the denial of education to the black majority, then South Africa would today be on a completely different developmental trajectory. We would be a more equitable nation, a more prosperous nation. We would have an advanced, diversified, more inclusive economy.”
Almost all South Africans agree that our country is in a crisis. Most government departments are paralysed by incompetence, corruption and a culture of entitlement.
The state of the economy, education, health services, infrastructure and safety are at a low point. The evil triplets of poverty, unemployment and inequality are thriving.
Moreover, a well thought-out plan to “Africanise” society in the name of transformation is being applied relentlessly.
The ANC must be congratulated for the care with which it prepares its members for important policy discussions of the kind that will soon be taking place at its 2015 National General Council. The NGC is the most important ANC meeting between National Conferences. It gives the organisation an opportunity to consider progress made with the implementation of policy since the preceding National Conference and to develop proposals for new policies at the next National Conference – which will take place at the end of 2017.
Luister, the video that was recently produced by the Open Stellenbosch (OS) movement, should be viewed by everyone who is interested in the future of our universities and the future of South Africa as a multicultural society. It presents 32 interviews – primarily with black students – regarding their sense of racial exclusion at Stellenbosch University. They complain of subtle – and not so subtle – racism in their interactions with white Afrikaans-speaking students – including accusations of out-and-out racial abuse in student bars and on the internet.
We welcome reassurances by South African Communist Party (SACP) deputy general secretary Jeremy Cronin of his devotion to the Constitution (A distortion to stir the demagogues, Letters, Business Day, August 11.
However, his criticism of Paul Hoffman’s view that “those who subscribe to the values of the national democratic revolution (NDR)” are “anticonstitutionalists” is disingenuous. The NDR is, in fact, profoundly irreconcilable with the Constitution – and particularly with its foundational value of non-racialism (and thus by extension with the foundational values of human dignity and equality as well).
The Department of Trade and Industry has just published the latest version of the Promotion and Protection of Investment Bill. The Bill has its origins in the government’s wish to reassure foreign investors who were alarmed by South Africa’s decision three years ago to terminate its Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs) with a number of European countries. Its purpose is supposedly to provide for “the legislative protection of investors” and the “promotion of investment”.
There has recently been a revealing polemical exchange between Joel Netshitenzhe, the former chief ideologist of the National Democratic Revolution, and the SACP’s chief ideologist, Jeremy Cronin.
In a critique of the SACP’s 2014 “Going to the Root” discussion document, Netshitenzhe endorsed the need for the radical implementation of the second phase of the NDR. However, he made the following points: