South Africa

Politics, South Africa

TRAINSPOTTER: How Hlaudi Motsoeneng stole the news

TRAINSPOTTER: How Hlaudi Motsoeneng stole the news

As the Svengali behind the evolving disaster at the national broadcaster, no other single South African in a generation has had a greater hand in crafting our own version of Unreality. The looming local/global apocalypse? Relax, Hlaudi’s got it “covered”. By RICHARD POPLAK.

In this newsy age in which we are lashed with real news, fake news and many varietals in between there is also a loftier species of news. Dozy South Africans were introduced to the latter last Wednesday, when the fake news, by which I’m referring to SABC Morning Live’s 7am news bulletin, was delayed by seven minutes in order to run a snippet celebrating the achievements of the state broadcaster’s Chief Executive for corporate affairs. The Lesotho All Stars (a name hinting at Lesotho provenance, but who knows) sang the following words, while dancing to a beat generated by a failing Dell desktop:

Leave him [Hlaudi] alone
Hlaudi wants African music to grow
We thank God for Hlaudi Motsoeneng
May God protect him for us
We love him.

Praise be, and all that.

Watch: Lesotho Allstars sing about Hlaudi Motsoeneng (SABC2 Morning Live, 6 December 2016)

Although he is no longer Chief Operating Officer of the SABC, and while that Sisyphean non-task of CEO now falls to James Aguma, we can all agree that the current iteration of the national broadcaster is very much the result of Hlaudi’s preternatural. Without question the weirdest individual currently clowning his way through the South African pantheon, Hlaudi is either:

  1. suffering from some bizarre narcissistic/hubristic breakdown,
  2. a performance artist jamming his way through the most elaborate reality TV show in the history of local broadcasting,
  3. simply doing his job which is to destroy the SABC, not to run it, or
  4. all of the above.

Over the course of last week, as the Lesotho All Stars were feverishly preparing for their big Local Content moment, an ad hoc parliamentary committee donned the proctology gloves and shoved a reluctant hand up the public broadcaster’s digestive chute. This was happening even as the lone non-executive board member, the almost metaphysically sleazy Mbulaheni Maguvhe, did everything he could to scuttle the investigation. He accomplished his work by withholding documents, by refusing to show up before the committee last Thursday, and by generally displaying an ability for quadruple-speak that dazzles even by tough local standards. But the process nonetheless trundled on.

Its findings were, let’s just say: not good.

It now seems clear that former board chairwoman and CV doctor, Ellen Tshabalala, along with Communications Minister, Faith Muthambi, shoved the unqualified Hlaudi into his position with as much suasion as they could muster. He was treated like the god of a cargo cult, praised by those who were meant to watch over him in turn, he behaved like a minor, slightly insane Egyptian boy-pharaoh, dispensing blessings and curses as he walked the SABC into a version of Armageddon. After he awarded himself an R11.4-million bonus last year, the board imploded, and there hasn’t been anything that could be considered internal oversight since then.

Hilariously, a PricewaterhouseCoopers audit, undertaken in 2013, found that the SABC lacked the “critical skills” to run so much as a kindergarten class, let alone migrate a massive state broadcaster from analog to digital.

But they couldn’t have been more mistaken. On Sunday, astounding revelations were published by City Press, asserting that Hlaudi had sold to MultiChoice two unencrypted digital channels for the one-time low, low price of R533-million. The 11.4-million bonus mentioned above? It was just over a third of the R30-million kickback that Hlaudi received for quarterbacking the deal which, it must be noted, was not just ridiculous, but probably illegal in about four thousand different, intersecting, and also competing, ways.

For one thing, when set-top box policy was long ago determined, it stated that South Africans would either buy or receive for free encrypted smart-box hardware that would pipe shitty digital TV into every home across the nation, while allowing even the poorest South Africans to download (and, presumably upload?) pornography via free internet access.

How to scuttle the policy? Along came MultiChoice. If the independent stations are weak and their programming unencrypted, MultiChoice, through its DStv network, benefits because it encrypts its signals. If the digital terrestrial transmissions were to be encrypted as policymakers determined they would be the company would face significantly more (gasp!) competition for the top range programmes that will never run over unencrypted digital networks. (Think of content producer selling a kick-ass big-budget show to the SABC, just so it could be pirated in an instant.)

But MultiChoice didn’t want competition, because competition sucks. What’s an evil megacorp to do?

Engage with the relevant connected ANC hacks, of course. And so, despite policymakers determining that South African digital TV should be encrypted, Muthambi, via Hlaudi, shoved through a deal that would sell two unencrypted television stations to MultiChoice. Following that, it was inevitable that the unencrypted digital dumb-boxes contrary to the policy set by South Africa’s paid representatives would be disseminated instead of the smart-boxes. The whole country’s digital future was determined by the hunger of Muthambi and Company who got paid very, very well (see above).

As a source told the City Press, “As I see it, the 2013 contract’s unprecedented and highly irregular reference to set-top box control was a way of paying Hlaudi to lobby government. Once policy changed, it was a way to make sure it stayed that way to ensure less competition in the future.”

Feel free, at this point, to go ahead and puke in your mouth.

***

If you happen to work in media in this country, you inevitably spend most of your time dwelling up your own ass. The latest line, constantly promulgated at US State Department-funded webinars or at journalism conferences in fancy hotel compounds, goes something like this: news consumption in the country is fragmenting; old media is dying; new media (like, for instance, this publication) is “changing the landscape”; mobile tech will help “reach the youth” in sexy, innovative ways.

Yes, but no. Because outside of the big media centres, none of this is true. State broadcasters wield an extraordinarily powerful role in creating a country’s sense of self, and this is certainly true of the SABC across this country’s vast flyover zone, media begins and ends with the SABC. Check the stats, and behold the echo chamber: the SABC mediates South Africa, which is in turn mediated by the SABC.

Out There, in the crannies of the country that the exciting new media landscape doesn’t touch, Hlaudi has the last word. By blowing billions of rand on artful mismanagement the broadcaster has lost at least R400-million this year, roughly the same amount as in 2014/2015 by pushing a local content agenda that is far more nativist than it is transformational, and by this whole set-top box debacle, Hlaudi has been steadily gutting the broadcaster both of seasoned content producers and viewership. (Hlaudi has deemed himself “happy” with these losses, as well he should be.) He is filling the media hole with… a bigger hole: in KwaZulu-Natal, the Indian community, for whom Lotus Radio has been a cultural mainstay, have ditched the station by the tens of thousands. But tens of millions of South Africans do not have that option.

So they sit and listen to and/or watch the information quarry widen, until it swallows them.

We now know that the findings of the Public Protector, which deemed Hlaudi’s initial appointment as basically insane, were binding. So his very existence as an executive officer at the SABC, in any capacity, is itself fictional by the law of the land, he cannot be there. And yet there he is. The SABC has a board, but board appointments in this country are rewards for slavishness, and besides, the parliamentary committee has determined that no one could stand up to Hlaudi’s state-backed bullying.

Also clear is the fact that Hlaudi operates under the protection of Communications Minister Faith Muthambi, who operates under the protection of the president of the Republic, which means he is not so easily taken out. Admittedly, it’s mildly enjoyable watching him kick politicians like Jackson Mthembu repeatedly in the nuts. But he has fired good journalists; he has ruined lives and careers; he has misspent gobs of taxpayers’ money. He has talked shit in quantities that could fertilise this drought-sick land for generations. Example, taken completely at random:

Research takes long. It takes three years to research and two years to implement it… too much education is dangerous. It’s like overdosing on your medicine. […] I said to a professor, you always quote people and books saying ‘so and so said this. When are you going to be quoted yourself?’ He could not answer many of my questions and in the end I knew I should be his mentor.

But all of this fine-grained detail is, ultimately, beside the point. Because Hlaudi’s appointment was meant to lead to all of this chaos. And the chaos has been sublime. The news vacuum that serves as a silently articulate endorsement of his achievements the censoring of election/student unrest; the praise-singing for President Zuma; the Putin-esque erasure of political contest is exactly what the Zuma government was after. And that’s what they’ve achieved.

Into the hole’s hole floods fake news hosed in by Paid Twitter, an alternative reality generated by a British PR firm in faraway London, disseminated by trolls decrying the continued influence of London in South African affairs. And so, like the rest of the world, we drift off into our little news silos, alone with heaps of bullshit manufactured by millionaires who get to laugh at the deplorable Muppets gobbling it all up with their nutritionally free breakfasts.

In 2016, South Africa finally became pure noise, with no signal. Nothing resembling a national culture or an esprit de corps exists any longer, not that it ever did. We are further from each other, more divided and angry, than we have ever been in our history and that includes the cold, cold years that preceded the Dawn of Reconciliation. If, as the Zimbabwean author Dambudzo Marechera once asserted, chaos is a higher form of order, then surely we can agree that Hlaudi Motsoeneng has been instrumental in creating the version of reality we now live in.

This country’s diminishing cohort of Jedi may yet dislodge him at some point, but by now, it hardly matters. He is the mentor’s mentor. He is the professor and the student and the teaching assistant. He is the crafter of our world. He is Jesus (his words, not mine).

Through absences, erasures, and outright thievery, Hlaudi Motsoeneng manufactures South African consent. At that vital task, he is more than a minor deity. He’s a full-blown god. DM

Photo: Hlaudi Motsoeneng, a frame from TimesLive video.

Gallery

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