JOHANNESBURG - The possibility that the imminent fall of the Independent News & Media Empire, might lead to the liberation of its colonial possessions has been met with some ill-disguised glee in South Africa. As Gill Moodie wrote on Moneyweb a couple of weeks ago, "the mere thought of the Irish leaving our shores has got hacks across the land shivering in anticipation and please forgive us if we take to the streets like grateful Munchkins, singing: ‘Ding-dong the witch is dead'."
The sentiment here seems to be that anyone - even businessmen acting as a front for the ruling ANC - would be preferable owners of much of the South African press than Tony O'Reilly & Co. The plunder of - or, to put it more politely, ‘lack of investment' in - the South African assets by their Irish owners has become a source of some rather morbid humour.
In an article first published on his weblog Professor Anton Harber stated that O'Reilly had made no real recent investment in infrastructure: "The headquarters in Sauer Street, Central Johannesburg, are so run-down they look like something from an Afghan village recently visited by an American bomber."
This outrageous comparison provoked Jeremy Gordin - ex of the Independent - into writing: "let me say that I have seen countless pictures of Afghan villages recently visited by American bombers - and it is deeply insulting to these places, and the people who live in them, to claim they are more run-down than the Indy's Sauer Street HQ. Just who does this Harber think he is?"
Fortunately perhaps, given the fraught state of South African - Afghani relations, another ex-Independent hack, John Matisonn, was able to settle what could have developed into a rather ugly international controversy. In a comment on Gordin's article he wrote:
"As one of the few people -- perhaps the only one -- to have had the privilege of working in both the Independent's Sauer Street Johannesburg offices and an Afghan village recently visited by an American bomber, I feel uniquely qualified to comment on the dispute between my two colleagues, Anton Harber and Jeremy Gordin. A dispute this serious between two eminent professionals cannot be allowed to lie unresolved.