PAUL T. SHIPALE
“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” But who will guard the guardians? – Who watches over the watchdogs? In a letter advising a friend about marriage and infidelity in the second century CE, Juvenal posed the question: “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” (But who will guard the guardians?). He argued that since men were guilty of infidelity, they could not use marriage to police women into fidelity.
In around 380 BC, Plato had tried to grapple with this question politically in the Republic through his Socratic Dialogue. In trying to explain Socrates’s views on the question, he argues that the guardians will be manipulated into guarding themselves through a deception called the ‘noble lie’. We all know the dismal failure of the ‘noble lie’ or the ‘magnificent myth’ notion in guarding rulers against excesses in wielding power.
Luzuko Buku wrote an article titled; “Citizen Editor’s apology exposes lie of self-regulation”, that was published on 18 Aug 2015. Luzuko Buku said the confession of The Citizen’s Editor Steven Motale proves that the ‘noble lie’ of print media self-regulation has failed. This comes after The Citizen’s Editor Steven Motale confessed that he led a deliberate onslaught against the then Deputy President and later President Jacob Zuma using The Citizen as his weapon.
Luzuko Buku said what is saddening about the apology is the revelation of the fact that many, if not all, newsrooms in South Africa are managed through careful manipulation aimed at creating a negative or positive picture of events. “If we were doubtful about whether we are receiving accurately reported news before, the apology has confirmed that we are swimming in the sea of gutter and gossip journalism”, he said.
Luzuko Buku further explained that there is everything wrong with propaganda, even in the form of oppositional or sunshine journalism as he advocates for well researched, balanced, factual and impartial news. “Anyone who uses our views in order to advance an agenda of sunshine journalism is just as much an enemy of news as someone who inculcates a culture of negative reporting – it’s all agenda driven and thus propaganda”, he said.
According to Luzuko Buku, the apology also brought to light the reality of concentrated media ownership in the country where a handful of companies rule the industry and occupy a very small fraction of the market but have a flawed philosophy of propaganda as news. Now if these media giants can set an agenda as described by Motale it means “they can make the entire nation a cog in their machines. Something that they can play with, without any penalty for they are self-regulating”, Luzuko Buku concludes.
This is indeed against the principles of freedom of the press, free speech and freedom of expression. We now live in an era of homogenous copy and paste reporting, in which every newspaper reports the same story without altering the angle, using the same inverted pyramid – for as long as it serves its intended purpose of attacking the government.
Whilst power corrupts, unchecked and absolute power corrupts absolutely. It is an incongruity that while all three arms of our state keep each other in check, the Fourth Estate is left to bogusly self-regulate and is running amuck in a frenzy of self-destruction and collateral destruction with everyone not in the media a victim.
As the media-consuming public, we should not allow ourselves to be condemned to docility by the alleged opinion makers because no lie is a ‘noble lie.’ In fact, one wonders also how newspapers come up with their headlines and hide under the veil of secrecy with what they call “their sources” who are never revealed.
I vividly recall when there were reports published in the newspapers about the renovation of the official residence of the Founding President as provided for by the Former Presidents’ Pension and Other Benefits Act 18 of 2004, which gives a retired President the right to be accorded “a furnished official residence at any place in Windhoek or at the request of the former President”.
On that occasion, there were several reports published in the newspapers with distorted headlines such as “Nujoma double-dips on housing benefit”. I guess the reports came about after some people felt that the Founding Father was being neglected after his house was demolished and had to stay without an official residence for quite some time.
One report was quoted saying “According to a person with direct knowledge about this matter, the house is equipped with an underground bunker and several nice-to-have security features. Allegations are that the state had no legal basis for upgrading Nujoma’s house”. The then Senior Special Assistant to the Founding President, John Nauta, told the newspapers that the Founding President declined a new house offer and instead opted to have his residence at the outskirts of Windhoek to be upgraded. “He did not want a new house. He preferred to stay in the house that was given to him by SWAPO,” Nauta said. Nauta further clarified that there is no underground facility. “There is no bunker,” he stated.
On her part, the Executive Director in the Office of the President, Ambassador Grace Uushona, also explained to the newspapers that the Cabinet had directed that a new house be built for the Founding President at an identified place after he retired. “But he refused to get a new house that time because he had an existing house where he was staying,” Uushona said, adding that it was then resolved that the existing house should be renovated in line with a security assessment.
“A consultant who was contracted to do the security assessment concluded that the house was not fit to be renovated but should be demolished and a new one constructed on the same premises,” Uushona said. She further explained that the Founding President played no role in the process. “Cabinet decided to build him a house, not him”, Uushona concluded.
Similarly, State House Press Secretary and spokesperson Dr Alfredo Tjiurimo Hengari issued a four-page statement to partly refute two stories published by the newspapers on the renovations to the Founding President’s house. Hengari said: “To say that the Founding President is double-dipping… is utterly dishonest”. “It is not in the character of the Founding President,” he added.
It seems the above reports were trying to “raise public anger against the Founding President as well as to tarnish his legacy, and to portray him as greedy and corrupt”, as Nauta concluded.
John Pilger, a prolific documentarian and writer who was at times polemicist says in one of his famous quotes “It is not enough for journalists to see themselves as mere messengers without understanding the hidden agendas of the message and the myths that surround it.”
Pilger also said “Many journalists now are no more than channelers and echoers of what George Orwell called the ‘official truth’. They simply cipher and transmit lies. It really grieves me that so many of my fellow journalists can be so manipulated that they become really what the French describe as ‘functionaires’, functionaries, not journalists”.
Indeed, many journalists become very defensive when you suggest to them that they are anything but impartial and objective. “It’s only when journalists understand the role they play in this propaganda, it’s only when they realize they can’t be both independent, honest journalists and agents of power that things will begin to change”, Pilger said. Richard Sandomir, an obituaries writer, in an article published on 25 January 2024, says John Pilger was a muckraking foreign correspondent and documentarian who trained his often righteous anger on injustices around the globe and was comfortable with his role as a journalistic provocateur who once was sometimes criticized for shaping his reporting to fit his worldview — that he subordinated journalism to advocacy, leading to some notable mistakes and questionable claims. On his part, Ian Jack in 2014, in a review about Alain de Botton, a Swiss-born British author and public speaker, in his book The News: A User’s Manual, said that the author wonders if our dash
to prefer distant sensation to local information, shows that at heart we are “truly shallow and irresponsible” citizens, or if the blame lies with journalistic convention and its “habit of randomly dipping readers into a brief moment in a lengthy narrative… while failing to provide any explanation of the wider context”.
Ian Jack said “De Botton thinks news should be more like novels, but what does he think news is? “The determined pursuit of the anomalous”. He also thinks there is too much of it and that we have become addicted – news junkies – and need to recognise its ill-effects, including the “envy and the terror” it promotes; hence what he calls his “little manual”, which he hopes will “complicate a habit that, at present, has come to seem a little too normal and harmless for our own good”.
What De Botton is attacking is journalism’s propensity for easy targets, reinforcing our impression that it fails to scrutinise the institutional flaws that have caused them. Of course, his attack has justice, but his verbal imprecision makes his argument hard to figure out, Ian Jack said.
The ‘dependency’ syndrome in our societies is an euphemism for ‘addiction,’ or as De Botton says ‘news junkies’. Let us all be the watchdogs over the watchdogs, especially in these trying times when there is the electoral challenge before the courts.
I was shocked to hear Henk Mudge of RP saying “I honestly hope that we will get a judgement that is going to be in favour of us, because we know that the elections were rigged”. I agree that this behaviour is like a child throwing a tantrum with some spinning stories backed by unsubstantiated WhatsApp chats rather than providing credible evidence and are just opposing the elections “for the mere sake of it” and failing to present a viable alternative.
As Advocate Raymond Heathcote said some “shall continue to fight a losing battle “come hell or high water”. They shall continue to defame the courts and tarnish Namibia’s good name in the world. They shall continue with waning confidence in the Helmeringhausen hills (in the middle of nowhere or a place that is very remote), and while staring defeat in the face in the Namibian valleys. They shall continue to brutalise the truth on the beaches of Walvis Bay and Swakopmund”. We knew that even after the basic victory of the struggle, there will still be a number of people in our society who vainly hope to restore the old system and are sure to fight the working class on every front, including the ideological one. And their right-hand men in this struggle are the revisionists and “comprador bourgeoisie” who align themselves to and promote foreign interests.
Let us give a chance to the President-elect, Meekulu Mukwanangombe, to take this country to greater heights as she promised that it will not be business as usual. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of my employer and this newspaper but solely my personal views as a citizen.
