Ed Herbst: ‘Struggle doctor’ Survé’s media transformation myth exposed

JOHANNESBURG — Ed Herbst is in top form again in this article in which he prods and probes Independent Media’s transformation record. The sharp-eyed Herbst discovered a figure which indicates that the Indy group has lower black ownership when compared to its peers. Like the quotes that Ed Herbst recently picked out highlighting ANC rule, this piece may leave you doing a double take. After all, Survé has talked up media transformation, yet his own media company is lagging behind, according to the data that Herbst presents below. Again, it will leave one questioning why the PIC ever got involved in the deal surrounding Independent Media in the first place. – Gareth van Zyl

By Ed Herbst* 

Brown told SABC Digital News in an interview on Thursday that the ANC and the government complained about the lack of transformation in the media and about the media taking the side of the political opposition and ganging up on the government. Yet it gave the bulk of its advertisements to the newspapers which were most critical of it, neglecting those which were balanced. – Brown tackles ANC on media transformation IOL 8/10/2015

BizNews and Naspers Media24 are the immoral alter egos of Bell Pottinger. – Iqbal Survé IOL 31/7/2017

Media transformation is a constant theme in the public utterances of Dr Iqbal Survé – that and his continuing attacks on Naspers – a necessary debate in that the PIC gave him an incredibly soft loan to create ‘a Naspers for black people’, but a debate, nevertheless, for another day.

To give you an idea of just how constantly Iqbal Survé stresses media transformation, consider this:

On the day (9 May 2016) that he snatched defeat from the jaws of defeat, his senior executives, Karima Brown and Vukani Mde – both of whom have a penchant for attending ANC events dressed in ANC apparel – by cosmic coincidence authored an article carried in all Indy titles which stressed its importance. It was headlined Media freedom cannot be divorced from transformation.

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May 9 last year was also the day when, after two years of negotiation Survé, conceding defeat, settled with Alide Dasnois and then in contravention of Amil Cabral’s dictum – ‘Claim no easy victories’ promptly did so with a front page article headlined Independent vindicated in Dasnois settlement.

(Although the by-line was the anonymous ‘Staff writer’ you can draw your own conclusions about who had authored it.)

Ordered to apologise

This, in turn, saw the SA Press Council ordering the Cape Times to apologise.  Thereafter, Survé followed the Gupta example by withdrawing from the newspaper ombudsman system – at a time when the Press Council was, in a single year, adjudicating on more than 70 complaints against his company’s publications.

So what does, ‘Transformation’, in practical terms and by the ANC’s definition, actually mean and entail?

It is an essential element of the glorious National Democratic Revolution and is based on the concept of untrammelled ANC hegemony, a concept last realised by the ANC in Quatro and currently realised in a Dionysian revolutionary paradise like North Korea.

At its heart lies ‘Demographic Representivity’.

Here’s how James Myburgh defined Demographic Representivity and merit – which is anathema to the ANC, witness our precipitous decline on every measure of effective governance and quality of life that has ever been devised – plays absolutely no role in the ANC’s implementation of ‘transformation’ through its cadre deployment policy.

This is the principle that all spheres of life in South Africa should be made to conform, at all levels, to the racial (and increasingly now gender) composition of the total economically active population of the country: 74.9% black, 11,3% white, 10.8% Coloured and 3% Indian.

Ethnic quota

It is an ethnic quota, pure and simple. At its heart is the idea of ring-fencing the trough and keeping out ‘the other’ or as Julius Malema defined it without contradiction when he was still within the ANC fold – it is all about keeping Whites, Indians and Coloureds away from the ‘economic cluster’, as he said at the time.

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To understand the origins of Demographic Representivity you have to go to Germany in the 1930s.

If Jesse Owens was enraging the Nazis, so too, was the fact that Jewish students were excelling in the entry exams for German universities, a demographic repeated in the role that this community plays in the annals of the Nobel laureates.

The Nazi response was to restrict the number of Jewish entrants to universities to the demographic ratio of Jews in the German population at the time – one and a half percent – ergo ‘demographic representivity’.

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Clik here to view.It was a concept enthusiastically embraced and endorsed by H F Verwoerd and, more recently, by Enoch (Canyon Springs) Godongwana, the ANC’s Head of Economic Transformation, who called for a more rigid application of ‘Verwoerdian quotas’. The silence from Luthuli House about Godongwana’s call was deafening, showing that it stands by this principle, even if the UN is opposed to it.

Black ownership

However you choose to define transformation, there is a singular measure of media transformation – the percentage of black ownership in the controlling company.

Given the constant rhetoric emanating from Survé and his acolytes one would imagine this, in Sekunjalo, to be 100%.

It is, in fact, little more than half that.

A year ago, Intellidex published its analysis of the shareholding of South Africa’s major media companies and Glenda Nevill broke the story on the Media Online website. Its facts have never been disputed and two figures in that analysis fascinated me.

The Times Media Group, which has been threatened with litigation by Survé and was accused by the short-lived Survé support group, The Movement for Transformation in Media in South Africa (MTMSA) of racial bias, was found to have a 58,47 black ownership percentage on the BEE scorecard compared with 55% for the newspaper company owned by the ‘Struggle Doctor’. That is ironic, is it not? Doubly ironic given the bizarre letter that Andrew Bonamour of TMG received from one of Survé’s discombobulated reporters.

Intellidex research report 2016: Who owns the news media

What these figures indicate is that Sekunjalo, after three years and a R1.2 billion PIC loan which is softer than goose down, is little more than half ‘transformed’ and less transformed than the Times Media Group which owns newspapers like the Sunday Times, the Sowetan, Business Day and Daily Dispatch.

Karima Brown, who has since joined the stampede for the Indy exit, alleges in an anchor quote to this article that the ANC government is not rewarding the newspapers which she claims are ‘balanced’ with the lion’s share of the advertising it dispenses – a claim which seems debatable.

Given the latest Fake News articles emanating from Newspaper House, the home of the Cape Times and the Cape Argus in Cape Town’s CBD and the fact that the Press Council was evaluating more than 70 complaints against Indy titles last year, I don’t think one can take Brown’s allegation of ‘balance’ seriously – not least because she has voted with her feet and chosen to resign from Survé’s company.

(My Loot-freely House Browse Moles say one of the reasons for the ANC’s failure to suitably reward Indy newspapers with the sort of advertising largesse which Survé feels his ANC loyalty deserves, is that Independent News Media has no significant newspaper presence in the Eastern Cape – certainly nothing that compares with the Daily Dispatch which is owned by the Times Media Group.)

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Survé has constantly bemoaned the lack of transformation in other South African media companies, yet his own company, as the Intellidex analysis reveals, does not exactly lead by example.

Vukani Mde and Karima Brown, in their righteous article of 9 May last year, claimed that media freedom in South Africa was utterly dependent on transformation and one wonders, thus, what they make of the Intellidex figures? Or what the One-Day Wonder, Wesley Douglas, who rose without trace after Alide Dasnois was fired, makes of them?

Call to be a constant brave transformation force was the headline on an article about a speech that Survé made last year. In this speech he launched a defamatory attack on Naspers and emulated President Jacob Zuma’s routine vilification of South Africa’s white minority, Afrikaners in particular. Given the Intellidex figures, is the clarion call of that headline not one that he should heed himself?

• Ed Herbst is a retired veteran journalist who writes in his own capacity

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