this is south africa

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.

That’s not a gopher

Posted on March 23, 2010March 23, 2010

Driving out of the car park at my new favourite drinking spot (which shall remain nameless so I can avoid the vast numbers of vigilante groupies that went after the unfortunate Fireman’s bouncer I mentioned yesterday), I happened to spot a Toyota RunX.
This one had one of those personalised number plates that I don’t really like, but at least this one was for business purposes. Almost excusable, then.

Here it is (you can see the whole car here):

Obviously, Gopher can like to be your number one choice (or close to it) when you’re looking for industrial property in Cape Town.
But not, it seems, if you are looking for accurate descriptions of small mammals. Because that thing under the ‘X’ of ‘RunX’ is not a gopher, Geomyidae spp.. It’s a meerkat, Suricata suricatta.
Which is all nice and African, since gophers are only found in the Americas and meerkats are far more local, but that’s like Hippo insurance brokers advertising their services with a picture of an elephant. Just foolish.

One gopher, Two meerkats. It’s not difficult.

Look. See how different they are? OK, so they both appear to have the ability to stand on their hind legs, but I once saw a bear do that on some BBC documentary programme (although, to be fair, it was chained by its neck to a pole and was being beaten with a big stick by a vodka-drinking Siberian bloke with a wild beard and an even wilder temper).

Up! Get up, you bastard!
Up! Or I’ll have you made into carpet slippers!

Hell, sometimes I can even manage to stand for a few brief seconds after 8 pints of Stella, so it’s nothing special.
And look how much bigger the gopher is than the meerkats. How anyone could ever confuse the t… sorry?… Ah, ok. Thanks.
Sorry – apparently the gopher just looks bigger because it is nearer the camera. The meerkats are far away….

But seriously – noting that the car has Irish badges all over the back windscreen – talk about reinforcing the stereotype…

</small mammal basic identification post>

Almost forgot

Posted on March 23, 2010March 23, 2010

Public holidays throw me out. Not throw me out like that wholly unjustified bouncer at Fireman’s last week. Nor as in a piece of rubbish (which again, links in nicely with the Fireman’s episode, because I ended up face first in a wheelie bin).
No. They throw me out because now I think that today is Sunday (it’s not) and tomorrow is Monday (it’s not). This misapprehension will continue through tomorrow (Monday), the day after (Tuesday) and it will be Thursday before I even realise that it is actually Thursday.

I was so thrown out today that I almost forgot to blog.

Yes. That’s what I felt like when I realised.

Typically, it being a Sunday morning (except it’s Monday), we headed down to the beach to give the kids some fresh air and steal some shells. Alex was in the midst of a particularly generous collective of mussels when a completely unexpected wave came after him. The result was the photo above.

Signs of the times

Posted on March 20, 2010

Since I’m stuck in the house with a small girl who is engrossed in Barbie presents Thumbelina for the 1000th time, I thought I’d chuck up a couple of quota photos. And today’s theme is road signs.

There are so many new signs going up around the city as part of the infrastructure upgrades for the World Cup (and beyond). Not that these ones will be replaced. Edinburgh Drive is still Edinburgh Drive and the M3 still goes to Cape Town.

For the moment.