JAUNDICED EYE

The 5Ws and an H. Who, what, where, when, why and how. 

They’re the absolute basics of journalism. There’s not a cub reporter — should any specimens of this depleted species survive — who doesn’t know that unless they address those questions, their news editor will kick their arse and send them off to try again.

Last week, newspapers published a news story based on a statement by the family of Pravin Gordhan, the former Minister of Public Enterprises. The nub of it was that he was gravely ill and had been admitted to hospital where he was “receiving the best possible medical care”. 

The immediate question for any journalist worth their salt — as well as many people on social media — was why did every single news outlet miss the omission. Where had Gordhan been admitted to? Where was this mystery hospital, lauded by the family as being the acme of South African medical excellence? 

Asking “Where?” is not just morbid curiosity nor to gratuitously intrude upon Gordhan’s privacy. It’s simply expecting the media to do its job: to deliver a fair and factual account that does not omit any salient facts. And in any dispassionate ranking of news importance, the first fact was the gravity of Gordhan’s illness; the second was the place where he was “receiving the best possible medical care”. 

Gordhan was a public figure, an African National Congress stalwart, and a hardline SA Communist Party ideologue. What category of hospital he chose to be admitted to on his deathbed — whether it was public or private — would always be more than a medical decision. It would be an act with political ramifications.

After all, it’s Gordhan’s party, in which he held a lifetime of high office until less than a year ago, which has just signed the extremely controversial National Health Insurance Act. Legislation that when implemented will not so much transform as destroy the private healthcare sector. 

The NHI is either the biggest act of political lunacy in South Africa’s democratic era or, if you are an acolyte, the boldest and most decisive step yet towards an equitable health system. In this imminent Utopia there will be no medical schemes. No one will be able to choose to pay out of their own pocket to use a private hospital, except for a handful of treatments the state concedes that it does not yet have the capacity for.

Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi, one of the NHI’s true believers, sets an admirable example. He reportedly uses only public hospitals. In the past fortnight, just prior to Gordhan’s hospitalisation, Motsoaledi was publicly scathing regarding the flawed character of those who argue that a citizen has a constitutional right to pay for private care of their choice. Such people, says Motsoaledi, are racists. Finished en klaar. 

The SACP is similarly strident on the issue. It has lobbied consistently and unequivocally for the extinction of private health care, which is “driven by a neo-liberal agenda fixated on profit accumulation”. 

One of Gordhan’s closest comrades was Solly Mapaila, general secretary of the SACP. According to City Press, Mapaila was one of the select few that Gordhan allowed to visit him in his private hospital suite. Back at the office, Mapaila habitually rails against users of such private hospitals as “reactionary elements and class forces who want to perpetuate inequality”.

Given the newsworthiness of where Gordhan chose to spend his last days, why didn’t the media ask the obvious question? Why did it take a week — and only after the name of the facility appeared on social media platforms — for the first news outlet to note blandly that Gordhan’s final days had been spent at the Wits Donald Gordon Medical Centre? The  centre, which is operated by Mediclinic in conjunction with the finest specialists moonlighting from the University of the Witwatersrand, prides itself on being the country’s “first and only private teaching hospital”. This is as elite as medical care could get in this country.

Aside from the omitted question being one of the 5Ws and an H of reporting, it was surely newsworthy on its own merits that Gordhan, a staunch socialist opponent of exploitative private health, had chosen to duck the warm embrace of the public system when it came to his own wellbeing and comfort. And, surely any hack should wonder, how does this deathbed dallying with capitalism reconcile with the SACP’s eulogy of Gordhan as “true to communist principles” to the end? 

After all, this is the man who when making his funeral arrangements from his private room in his private hospital attended by South Africa’s best privately paid oncology experts, was adamant that his body could only be flown to Durban by a state-owned South African Airways, not by any of SAA’s private-sector competitors. 

These are questions that any vaguely competent journalist would ask. These are contradictions that any professional news organisation would interrogate and highlight. 

Sometimes they do. When Deputy President Paul Mashatile passed out during a public meeting last Saturday, every single news report made the not-so-subtle point that the country’s second most important leader had been taken to a PRIVATE hospital. 

The difference between the reporting of the two incidents is unlikely to be accidental.

Mashatile is deservedly reviled by the pro-Ramaphosa mainstream media as a corrupt thug sympathetic to the state-looting Zuma faction and who, God help us, will step into Cyril Ramaphosa’s stylish Bathu sneakers, were the president to drop dead. Gordhan, the almost unanimously fulsome mainstream narrative goes, is an anti-corruption super hero who stood alone against state looting and for this reason was shamefully vilified in crudely racist terms by the pro-Zuma parties and their camp followers.

Reality is more nuanced and considerably less flattering. While it is true that Gordhan stoutly resisted the depredations of the Zuma faction while he was Minister of Finance, his anti-corruption efforts were conspicuously less energetic while serving as Minister of Public Enterprises during the five years of the first Ramaphosa administration. 

Look at the numbers. According to the Auditor-General, there was R44.5 billion in irregular expenditure at SAA in the four years to 2023 and its financial statements, which were illegally not submitted during that period, contained “material misstatements”. This was not state looting by Zuma and his criminal cronies. This malfeasance took place under Gordhan’s watch, whose vanity project to “save” the national carrier also cost R38 billion in state bailouts.

When questioned by Parliament’s financial oversight committee on the allegedly corrupt deal that gifted the Takatso a 51% equity stake in SAA for the princely sum of R51, Gordhan flatly refused to divulge to MPs the information that he was statutorily bound to provide. This is the same man that Judge Dennis Davis today eulogises as “a true model of a constitutional citizen”. 

Again, let’s look at the numbers. It’s estimated that Transnet lost around R23 billion to corruption between 2009 and 2023. Eskom is even worse, a staggering R203 billion. 

But as far back as January 2021, Eskom CEO André De Ruyter made public his concerns over endemic procurement fraud and the awarding of contracts to ANC-connected entities in the Ramaphosa administration. Gordhan did nothing.

In 2022, De Ruyter went to Gordhan and named two serving Cabinet Ministers of whom there was allegedly evidence of ongoing involvement in corrupt Eskom procurement contracts. Gordhan’s response was a shrug of the shoulders.

In 2023, when De Ruyter unsuccessfully argued for enhanced controls over the US$8.5 billion funding coming from the European Union, the United States and the United Kingdom to fund our energy transition programme, he got nowhere. He said he was instead told by an unnamed Minister, “In order to pursue the greater good, you have to enable some people to eat a little bit.”

 De Ruyter has thus far wisely refused to reveal the identity of this cheerfully amoral Minister. We know that the former Eskom CEO worked mainly with Gordhan but that he did also partner with Environment Minister Barbara Creecy to negotiate the green transition deal. Both denied culpability for those words, which could well serve as the official motto of the ruling party. 

There is inarguably much to praise about Gordhan’s contribution to the establishment of democracy in South Africa. There is also no reason to doubt the truth of his statement that he had personally “never stolen a cent” in his many years as a public servant.

However, there is plenty to suggest that Gordhan tolerated the thievery of the corrupt ANC elite on whose support Ramaphosa’s presidency depends. As a ministerial aide once explained to Daily Maverick, Gordhan prided himself on being a “progressive pragmatist”.

The sycophantic and emotional coverage of Gordhan’s death is just another example of often lopsided and arguably deliberately slanted reporting by the mainstream media. These outlets do themselves and South Africa a disservice with their pitifully inadequate grasp of the fundamental precepts of good journalism.

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