In this latest #SliceofGasant, columnist Gasant Abarder says he has been looking for a credible source of facts to inform his opinion of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and has found it tough going. But if you look closer to home, you’ll recognise the big local story – SA’s spectacular fall from grace as a moral compass.
Abarder, who recently launched his book, Hack with a Grenade, is among the country’s most influential media voices. Catch his weekly column here, exclusive to Cape {town} Etc.
Would you pick a fight with Vladimir Putin? I would put him in the same category as Bakkies Botha and Eben Etzebeth, who recently were handbag-ing at dawn. I wouldn’t pick a fight with either of these gentlemen and neither would I scrap with Comrade Vlad.
Vlad looks like the type of chap who rinses his teeth with vodka after brushing his pearly whites with a steel brush. I’ve seen pictures of him taking a dip in icy waters – for fun! He has the general demeanour of a guy whose morning exercise routine involves wrestling a Himalayan brown bear before taking a huge dump in the forest and then catching a rabbit to wipe his bum with. All before breakfast.
That’s the image the media has captured for me of old Vlad – friend of Jacob Zuma and calm only when he is whispered sweet nothings to by the likes of Lindiwe Sisulu.
I don’t know enough about what has caused the armed conflict between Russia and Ukraine except for the almost decade-long tussle over Crimea. But I am not flicking through DSTV’s suite of international news networks to find out. I am deliberately avoiding them the way folks are avoiding a premium subscription and rather stream their fix of the English Premier League.
I just don’t trust the western mainstream media for them to provide me with facts to have an informed opinion.
Just look at the way Associated Press, Reuters and AFP cover Africa. They’re there for the conflicts but I rarely, if ever, see a story about development, commerce or prosperity on the continent. (With the notable exceptions of journalists like my former colleague, Leanne de Bassompierre, who has been freelancing from the Ivory Coast as her base in both English and French and doing a splendid job.)
The lack of credibility filters down to local media houses who gobble up the wire copy with little discernment. It’s tough when you’re on a skint budget and can’t afford to have your own correspondents located around the globe. It is really an indictment that we rely on foreign agency copy from the west to publish take-what-you-can-get African stories.
Back to Vlad and his invasion of the Ukraine. He is a bully of the worst kind and instead of the strongman image, we’ve seen he is actually a weak man. A weak leader. War is never justified – not even as a last resort – because the majority of victims will always be the innocent and the effects are felt for many generations to come. It’s no surprise that the aggressors are men.
It does beg the question though about the gatekeepers of news and the hierarchies of what constitutes news values. The invasion of Ukraine is newsworthy. But so too, for example, are the regular incursions into Palestine by armed Israeli soldiers and the brutal bombing of Yemen by the Saudis. Some of the correspondents at western media outlets even contest that Palestine actually exists.
We’ve had our own dose of this brand of hypocrisy recently during the pandemic when the western media dubbed the Omicron strain of COVID-19 the South African variant because our scientists were the first to detect it. Never mind the accolades for our scientists. Instead, we were penalised with travel bans and the impact on our economy was disastrous. All along, of course, there was evidence that Omicron had actually been traced to Europe as point of origin.
It is interesting watching the news media in South Africa cover the Russian-Ukraine conflict from within its borders. And commentators have quite rightly honed in on the South African government’s non-response so far in the events that have been unfolding.
The big takeaway is how far South Africa has fallen from grace as a moral compass. It is a brick to the head. Or should that be BRICS to the head? South Africa is the ‘S’ in the BRICS grouping of strategic emerging partner countries, along with Brazil, Russia, India and China, in a trade and diplomatic alliance. It has the tiniest financial muscle of the five so it should mind what it says.
Yet, Brazil has joined the many nations who have condemned Russia. South Africa can’t and it won’t. It will argue that armed conflict is never the way, as it argues when it gives apartheid Israel a klap every now and then. But it was a hollow lecture because the last time we could actually credibly climb on such a high horse was in the era of Madiba’s presidency. Those days are long gone.
What is even more dangerous is the unfiltered, biased and rabid Fox News style, free-for-all and wall-to-wall coverage. The ideal of a credible news organisation is to limit harm and facilitate bringing the temperature down with voices of reason. We can all agree there is very little of that happening. In its absence, we may as well be wiping our bums with a nuclear warhead, thinking it’s a rabbit.
Also read:
Have I conditioned myself to loathe my Cape Flats coloured self?
Picture: Twitter
