From left: President Cyril Ramaphosa. (Photo: Thierry Monasse / Getty Images) | EFF leader Julius Malema. (Photo: Gallo Images / ER Lombard) | Russian President Vladimir Putin. (Photo: Getty Images / STR) 
What do you do if you’re one of the many people who believes that both the “West” and the “East” – insofar as there are such things – suck big hairy eggs?
What if you happen to understand that the ANC is an unsalvageable sleazefest, but that opposition parties in South Africa – who should have the very easiest job on the planet – are also a bunch of high-grade losers?
What if you have proven time and again the public sector in South Africa is beyond saving, but the private sector cannot save us on its own, either?
What if you understand that Big Pharma has gone so deep that it needs to be stripped down to its underpants and waterboarded until it stops acting like a deranged sociopath, but you also know that vaccines are saving billions of lives while not implanted with 5G technology?
What if you think both Barbie AND Oppenheimer are reactionary corporate mind-wipes signalling the impossibility of creating art in the 21st century?
Holding two thoughts in one head may not be very au courant, but the world is a complicated place.
In the South African discourse, any criticism of Russia – which has illegally invaded a neighbour and is currently bombing port infrastructure that facilitate grain exports to many a hungry nation in the world – is trolled into being a de facto endorsement of American hegemony. Indeed, take issue at all with this white supremacist ethno-nationalist backwater, and you’re accused of … racism?
Read more in Daily Maverick: SA’s relations with Russia
In most moral universes, employing some circumspection regarding Russia’s motivations for invading Ukraine should be an acceptable pastime. Not here. And to be sure, this publication has been, and will remain, resolutely critical of the invasion. Again, that shouldn’t be confused with an endorsement for the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, or a plea for the continued subjugation of Palestinian rights, or an attempt to bury the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop. It’s just that invading countries and killing civilians is a shitty thing to do, and there should be a censure for that sort of thing.
South Africa, of course, maintains a “non-aligned policy” regarding the Ukraine invasion. So it was a strange day when Daily Maverick was denied accreditation for the Russia/Africa summit taking place soon (depending on when you read this) in St Petersburg. On the face of things, the summit is a mechanism for African countries to increase their business relationship with a very minor international trading partner – South Africa conducts about 2% of its trade activity with Russia.
There are the mechanics of the invasion to discuss, along with the very real issue of increased global food prices now that Russia has pulled out of the Ukraine grain export deal and is trying to wipe out Odesa. There is the continued issue of energy stability, along with the spectre of sanctions, which has decoupled Russia’s economy from the formal global system.
Communication shutdown
In other words, although Russian trade is barely a rounding error on the annual balance sheet, this summit takes place during a major geopolitical moment, and considering the fact that South Africa remains a democracy, it should be covered by a free press.
But nope.
This forms part of a larger trend under way in this country, where political parties, government agencies and corporations are increasingly declining to speak to the press. Since the VBS bank scandal revelations dropped in Daily Maverick in 2019, the Economic Freedom Fighters, led by prolix flip-flopper Julius Malema, has “banned” the publication from covering its events, and refuses requests for comment. No one likes to be busted stealing money from starving grandmothers – we understand that. But the EFF ban is nothing more than punishment for good journalism. And they keep screwing it up: their current 10th anniversary celebrations have been marred by the planned presence of the vastly homophobic Kenyan academic Patrick Lumumba, who gave a keynote address on, of all things, “pan-Africanism”.
https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2019-09-08-vbs-theft-money-laundering-lifes-little-luxuries-julius-malemas-time-of-spending-dangerously/
The South African Football Association (Safa), another organisation currently suffering under investigative journalist Pauli van Wyk’s scrutiny, has also effectively banned this publication. Minerals and Energy Minister Gwede Mantashe, once so talkative, has clammed up, despite his insistence that it’s vital to hold an open line of communication with the press.
And it’s not just government or opposition parties. Send a list of questions to Sony Music Entertainment? Not a peep. Send an interview request to Barrick Gold Corporation? The run-around. What do these huge multinationals have to fear? Do they believe that their silence will kill our stories? Do they think that this is the journalistic equivalent of cancelling/unfollowing, and we’ll be shamed into silence?
Existential concern
No publication is perfect, and we all make mistakes. But for an outfit like Daily Maverick, even a throwaway line in an article can have severe consequences. We are subject to the censure of the press ombudsman and the very well-resourced targets of our investigations have access to the best legal minds on this or any other continent. When we get it wrong – which we sometimes do – we are punished financially. Worse, we lose the trust of our readers, we lose the support of our Insiders, and we face the prospect of withering and dying.
For any publication, but especially for independent media, getting the facts right is an existential concern.
But keep this in mind: The EFF has never sued. Safa has never sued. Gwede Mantashe has never sued. The Russian Embassy, a country that jails and murders journalists and opposition leaders and closes media organisations that are not operated by the state or by friendly oligarchs, has dragged Daily Maverick to the press ombudsman. (Because it costs them nothing.)
That’s a right that no one enjoys in Russia. But here, they are free to enjoy it themselves. You’re welcome, comrades.
The favour, clearly, has not been returned. Think about it: A media house that the Russian state has the right to harass in South Africa is forbidden from reporting on the activities of our own government in Russia.
The con men who run the biggest country on Earth are so terrified of media houses witnessing – well, what exactly? Will there be a display of brown envelopes? Will there be a bootlicking contest? Will there be a ritual release of kompromat on the ANC officials in attendance?
https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2023-06-25-with-putins-russia-south-africa-is-committing-a-historic-mistake/
Despite the ANC’s historical ties with the Soviet Union – to which Ukraine famously belonged – the Ramaphosa government’s addiction to the Russians has never made much logical sense. He forged his reputation crafting the progressive constitution that governs this land – he literally helped write the damned thing. In South Africa, political opposition, minority rights, gay rights, religious freedom and the freedom of speech (within bounds) are enshrined in law. Most of these things are not just illegal in Russia, they can lead to sudden flying-out-of-window syndrome.
The ANC clearly sees something else in Putin’s Russia – something aspirational. Ramaphosa owes his presidency, in no small part, to the relentless reportage visited upon his corrupt predecessor. In other words, freedom of speech is an essential component of political freedom. And the exercise of political freedom is likely to drop the ANC below majority party status in 2024.
Autocracies' beacon on the hill
Russia is the beacon on the hill, a shining autocracy that lights the way to eternal governance. The constitutional values that Ramaphosa helped craft are not the values of his desiccated, dying party. Instead, the ANC is drawn to Putin and his FSB men, who skulk about in the palaces exchanging recipes for poison while their “special military operation” burns through young Russian men at a rate of 700 a day.
The official reaction of Ramaphosa’s spokesperson will one day be studied as a perfect passive aggressive move and is worth quoting here:
In response to a request from Daily Maverick for comment about the revoking of Fabricius’s accreditation, Presidency spokesperson Vincent Magwenya said the Russia-Africa Summit is “not a South African government event, and all we did was to share the link that was provided to us. By doing so, we were not assuming any responsibility for the accreditation of South African journalists.”
Nothing to see here comrades, move along. The fact that the SA government did not see any problems with its own citizens being treated as collateral damage in Russia’s info wars and with the gross violation of every tenet that the SA constitution was built on, is too disturbing from way too many angles. Not that the ANC comrades will lose any sleep over another constitutional amnesia.
And so as Ramaphosa and his African counterparts are feted in St Petersburg, they will do so with less scrutiny, under a cover of mendacity. Ban one media outlet, and eventually you ban them all.
The tactic is to shut us out.
It won’t work. It just makes us more resolutely curious, more circumspect, and more certain that these entities have something to hide.
South African media isn’t perfect. But it’s a vibrant, noisy component of this democracy, and it isn’t going anywhere. They can run to St Petersburg, but they can’t hide.
We’ll find them, no matter how far they scurry. DM
Daily Maverick foreign policy specialist Peter Fabricius’ accreditation for the Russia-Africa Summit in St Petersburg this week was rescinded by the Roscongress Foundation, the Russian government body which is organising the forum.