Red Alert: On Your Marks, Get Set!

The race is on. But what race is that, you may wonder.

The 53rd ANC Conference is underway: the drafting team is busy processing resolutions from commissions and while considering the key issues that warrant inclusion in the conference declaration. Outside, meanwhile, the race is on.

Disappointed by the outcome of the elections at the Mangaung conference and unable to face up to the fact that the man they hate the most has just won the ANC leadership election convincingly, the media has launched "the race of the decade." Not just any race, but the race.

The press presents newly elected Deputy President of the ANC Cde Cyril Ramaphosa as the best thing to happen to South Africa since the World Cup. I have yet to find a single article or commentary in the media analyzing in any depth the policy decisions that came out of Mangaung.

Instead we are treated to the race, and a pile of spin about how overwhelmingly popular the ANC Deputy President is, because of the numbers of votes he got at Mangaung. The sub-text is that this means he beat President Zuma, and the fact that the President won the election for that post is heavily down played.

Couldn't the press accept that President Zuma won the election? And that it was in that electoral framework that the DP received the number of votes he did. Ah, but that would have go against the grain of the media's clumsy "BZD" campaign - the Bring Zuma Down Campaign.

A pause for Christmas and the press was at it again. Suddenly a routine ANC mobilization was subject to all manner of warped interpretations.

ANC officials and NEC members were working overtime campaigning door-to-door, addressing mini rallies, giving talks and breakfast briefings - all part of the mobilization for the January 8 rally.

But this year's reporting of the mobilization activities is not only driven by amnesia but packed with interpreting how the Deputy President gets out his car, how he walks and the lilt his accent. Every minute detail is scrutinized as proof of his readiness to replace the man they so badly want to see trounced.

A common enough ANC programme has been reduced to parading the debutant, as one writer puts it. The debutant in question - a member of the ANC NEC - we are told has been absent from politics for 15 years. If I cut through the media amnesia I realize that Cde Cyril Ramaphosa has in fact been a member of the ANC NEC throughout those 15 years.

How can you be an NEC member and not be active in politics? Or does the press mean that active politics is all about backroom wheeling and dealing, or and jumping from backing Zuma one day to supporting somebody else? 

This is the crux of problem with South Africa's media. They have now summoned up a phantom succession battle in the ANC. The race is on, we are told. Ramaphosa versus Zuma. You'd better believe it. The media told you.

Soon the usual charges will be wheeled out: the ANC doesn't provide leadership for the country, its officials are all in it for themselves, everything is riven by factionalism surfing a waves of corruption. Yadda, yadda, yadda.

And this is our media remember. It is supposed to be a vital weapon in the hands of our people. I have never seen a hatred for one person so completely seize an institution as to sink it. We've got a responsibility to get the media off its "BZD" Campaign habit.

Malesela Maleka is SACP Spokesperson, a member of the YCL NC and NWC.

This article first appeared in Umsebenzi Online, the online journal of the SACP.

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