I just got off the phone with an Australian journalist who produces a weekly television news programme. She is doing background research about our country (unlike some British columnists) with a view to putting together a story about what lurks beneath the glitz and glamour of the Soccer World Cup. She put me in an awful predicament, one I never fail to escape when speaking to foreign correspondents about South Africa. Do I defeat prejudices about the state of our nation in a fit of sunshine commentary? Or do I ignore how the facts will be spun and simply put them out there? Integrity demands honesty and so I shared the illustrative madness of the African National Congress Youth League's Floyd Shivambu when we got stuck into a conversation about media freedom.
We need to stop gloating about being a reasonably robust democracy in terms of the formal or procedural benchmarks of democracy and democratisation. Of course formal democracy is a great achievement, not least when one considers the deep anti-democratic history we have inherited as well as the lack of democratic beacons in our geopolitical region. I don't want to be lackadaisical, therefore, about such things as substantively free and fair, regular elections or a multiparty electoral system or a reasonably independent judiciary. They all matter.
However, we must set the bar much higher. The question now is whether we are entrenching a deeper democratic culture that will ensure we graduate from formal democratic success to an indestructible democratic culture. This requires all of us to show a serious understanding of what it means to respect fundamental rights and values envisioned and enshrined in the constitution. On this score, we are not doing sufficiently well as a nation. We all pay lip service (on most days but not always) to constitutionalism (which is a good start, I guess) but not all of us appreciate what it means to take constitutionalism to heart.
This brings me to the thuggish behaviour of Floyd Shivambu, the ANCYL's spokesperson. Here is a classic example of someone not understanding the difference between merely paying lip service to a right (and even this he does badly) and actually respecting others' entitlement to substantive enjoyment of that right. I am, of course, talking about his thuggish disregard of what press freedom means. It is worth unpacking his madness because it is not isolated; it is sadly only one example from a pattern of anti-democratic actions that are emerging in our body politic. We need to root it out quickly.
In a series of incoherent public statements (both press releases and media appearances), Shivambu (and his fellow Youth League leadership) has been launching a blatant attack on political journalists, threatening to reveal unsavoury details about their lives, ranging from allegations of laws that had been broken (such as the money laundering charges against a City Press journalist) to salacious and possibly embarrassing facts about folks' sex lives, financial delinquency and other truths or falsehoods that have no apparent bearing on their professional lives.
One justification they give for these threats is the disingenuous claim that they are simply being virtuous citizens by exposing lawbreakers. Another, more honest reason, is the reported retort by Shivambu that if the media could investigate Malema, then the ANCYL can investigate the media. This is bolstered by a proud, reported claim that reliable but conveniently anonymous sources are feeding them information that forms the basis of these threats.