politics – Page 69

All is calm

Posted on April 5, 2010

Remember Easter in 2007?

No – me neither. But I found a nice sunset picture from back then that I thought might be appropriate for a quick quota photo this evening. It’s quiet, serene, beautiful: calm.

Sun

South Africa has made it safely and quietly through two days since the death of Eugene Terre’Blanche. It’s a good start.
Life goes on, despite the supposed threats, anger and hatred.

Even as the Easter Bunny (me) was busy laying bunny tracks and eggs in the back garden at dawn, news was filtering through of the murder of Eugene Terre’Blanche. Now, while Eugene was not a terribly nice bloke by any stretch of the imagination, he was still (genetically, at the very least) a human being and he met a horrible and unnecessary end. His death is a bad thing for his organisation, his family and his friends. It could be a very bad thing for South Africa.

That said, I don’t think that Terre’Blanche’s murder will be a trigger for mass racial violence. For all his bravado and words, he actually wielded very little power. His ideas were outdated and laughably extreme, his organisation largely ignored. For this reason, I don’t believe that there was anything more to his death than meets the eye. Whatever they may wish to believe, the AWB is nothing more than a fly on the thick skin of the ANC elephant – not even acknowledged as an irritation. So why bother?

The concern for me is some possible retaliation for Terre’Blanche’s death. That some idiot goes out and – unilaterally – avenges the murder with some act of mindless violence. And so it escalates: quickly.
Branko Brkic paints the perfect scenario for the start of a civil war, citing Yugoslavia and Rwanda as examples. Many of the ingredients are worryingly present in the current SA. As he points out, South Africa needs to think clearly now.

Many will blame this murder on Julius Malema, the firebrand leader of the ANC Youth League. Some already have. But the truth is that we will never honestly know whether Malema’s words and alleged hate speech were a factor in this attack. But the continuing simmering racial tension is undoubtedly being heightened by his actions. As Helen Zille remarks:

“The singing of songs such as ‘kill the boer’ creates a climate in which violence is seen as an appropriate response to problems, whether personal or collective.”

This is a potential turning point for South Africa and it’s important to choose the correct direction. Sense should prevail.
Jacob Zuma could aid in this by reining Malema in. Whether or not Terre’Blanche’s death was due to Malema’s much-publicised recent comments, his words are divisive and unhelpful, just as Terre’Blanche’s were. The only difference is that Malema is getting as much free publicity as he wants to spread his gospel. And that has to stop.

It’s time to take a step back, a deep breath, some time out. And listen again to the sense of Branko Brkic:

White people should understand that their black friends are not going to kill them tomorrow because two frustrated, drunken youths killed Terre’Blanche somewhere in North West.
Black people should understand their white friends will not form the Ku Klux Klan just because a couple of hotheads are threatening revenge.

I hope that South Africa has come far enough to overcome this latest and difficult hurdle.
Watch this space, I guess.

SpeakZA – Bloggers for a Free Press

Posted on March 24, 2010March 24, 2010

SpeakZA – Bloggers for a Free Press

Last week, shocking revelations concerning the activities of the ANC Youth League spokesperson Nyiko Floyd Shivambu came to the fore. According to a letter published in various news outlets, a complaint was laid by 19 political journalists with the Secretary General of the ANC, against Shivambu. This complaint letter detailed attempts by Shivambu to leak a dossier to certain journalists, purporting to expose the money laundering practices of Dumisani Lubisi, a journalist at the City Press. The letter also detailed the intimidation that followed when these journalists refused to publish these revelations.

We condemn in the strongest possible terms the reprisals against journalists by Shivambu. His actions constitute a blatant attack on media freedom and a grave infringement on Constitutional rights. It is a disturbing step towards dictatorial rule in South Africa. We call on the ANC and the ANC Youth League to distance themselves from the actions of Shivambu. The media have, time and again, been a vital democratic safeguard by exposing the actions of individuals who have abused their positions of power for personal and political gain.

The press have played a vital role in the liberation struggle, operating under difficult and often dangerous conditions to document some of the most crucial moments in the struggle against apartheid. It is therefore distressing to note that certain people within the ruling party are willing to maliciously target journalists by invading their privacy and threatening their colleagues in a bid to silence them in their legitimate work.

We also note the breathtaking hubris displayed by Shivambu and the ANC Youth League President Julius Malema in their response to the letter of complaint. Shivambu and Malema clearly have no respect for the media and the rights afforded to the media by the Constitution of South Africa. Such a response serves only to reinforce the position that the motive for leaking the so-called dossier was not a legitimate concern, but an insolent effort to intimidate and bully a journalist who had exposed embarrassing information about the Youth League President.

We urge the ANC as a whole to reaffirm its commitment to media freedom and other Constitutional rights we enjoy as a country.

Blog Roll

Tomorrow

Posted on March 23, 2010March 24, 2010

Tomorrow, 6000 miles… will join many other South African blogs taking part in Sipho Hlongwane’s #SpeakZA campaign against the ANC Youth League’s recent attacks on media freedom.

On Thursday March 18, Sipho Hlongwane, a 21-year-old law student from the KwaZulu-Natal midlands, read a piece on the Daily Maverick news site entitled, “Political journalists complain to the boss about ANC Youth League spokesman Floyd Shivambu.” The piece, you may remember, republished a letter sent by nineteen of the country’s top political journalists to ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe. The journalists’ complaint was that Shivambu had threatened them when they questioned the authenticity of a dossier he’d attempted to leak. The subject of the dossier? The private life of City Press reporter Dumisani Lubisi, who, you may also remember, was instrumental in exposing Youth League president Julius Malema’s various business interests.
Hlongwane, on reading this and further concerns raised in the letter – for instance, Malema’s public warning that he’d personally “arrest” journalists caught breaking the law (ja, he said it) – realised he was being informed of a worrying new phenomenon.
“For the first time I got a shock,” he remembers. “I realised the lengths to which the ANC Youth League would go. This was the most blatant attack on media freedom I could remember. I thought, ‘What can I do?’ Social media seemed like a good answer.”

Link

Word on the street is that the campaign post may well include the word “hubris”, and if you think that sounds a bit rude, maybe you need to go and look it up. Or you can just pretend you know what it means and giggle about Floyd Shivambu’s (apparently “breathtaking”) hubris, like I did.

UPDATE: Sipho’s thoughts are now up on 6000 miles… and a whole lot of other blogs, too.

Striking nastiness

Posted on March 21, 2010March 22, 2010

Not much from me tonight, but here is an interesting story on the current British Airways dispute.
To be perfectly honest, I haven’t paid a huge amount of interest as to what is going on between BA and the Unite Union, but as this is slowly boiling down to workers (and the public) taking sides in what seems to be becoming a personal scrap between BA’s Willie Walsh and Tony Woodley et al of Unite, I’m getting more interested.

Sky News was reporting some pretty nasty stuff going on and reading the Telegraph article brought back some vivid memories of the 1984 Miners’ Strike. I lived in Sheffield at the time, and the papers were full of the violence that surrounded that strike, not least the infamous Battle of Orgreave on the other side of the city. And yes, again there was that personal element at the top – Thatcher versus Scargill.
But that was the dirty, grimy mining industry and these are the guys that offer you drinks on the night flight to Heathrow. That was 1984, in the rough North of England; this is 26 years on in the shiny corridors of Terminal 5.

So why on earth do I find myself reading stuff like this?

It can be revealed that some female cabin staff braved the threat of intimidation by union workers to go to work as normal yesterday.
Some of those who worked had received threatening emails on Friday night, one of which read: “If any of you go into work tomorrow, your life won’t be worth living.”

Nice.

There’s obviously more to this than just a row over whether hot towels should be dished out on short-haul flights. With the UK general election around the corner and Unite funding the Labour Party to the tune of £11million, with Charlie Whelan as Unite’s political director and with these ridiculous threats flying around, this is going to be a story worth digging deeper into.

I’m off to polish my spade.

UPDATE: Started reading on the Miners’ Strike instead of the BA one. But there are some thought-provoking and salient lines in there, relevant to the BA dispute:

Those who called the miners “the enemy within” might have won the war, but they did not win many hearts or minds.

Trouble is, I’m just not sure which side they’re relevant to.

Category: politics

All is calm

What now?

Tomorrow

Striking nastiness