Reasons for ANC media clampdown becoming clearer

President Jacob Zuma's son, Duduzane Zuma, along with the increasingly infamous Gupta family, pulled a show stopper when their company Imperial Crown Trading (ICT) was awarded ArcelorMittal's lapsed stake in Kumba Iron Ore's Sishen mine, only to sell it back to ArcelorMittal in what has been described as "the most toxic empowerment deal ever".

Fighting in the courts

ArcelorMittal has agreed to buy ICT for R800 million, should this politically very well connected company manage legally convert its prospecting right to a mining right - something Kumba is fighting in the courts. ICT's shareholders also received a 50% stake in ArcelorMittal's R9 billion BEE deal, according to Times Live. One of the beneficiaries called it "money for jam".

The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) has gone as far as calling the deal a looting scheme by "well-connected BEE parasites".

In a piece by the Sunday Times that will certainly reverberate through the country for a while yet, former President Thabo Mbeki and the ruling party is linked directly to the setting up of Schabir Shaik's business empire.

Archive access limited

The newspaper quotes from a document saved from Nelson Mandela's archives found in a storeroom at Eastern Cape's Fort Hare University. Access to the archive has been limited since stories about its content started to surface in the media, and some letters has been "classified" by university officials (and the POI Bill isn't even law yet!), according to a report by I-Net Bridge.

According to the Sunday Times, the document shows that Mbeki was central in advising Shaik to create the company that would fund the ANC through "patriotic" dividends paid out for major government contracts. The meeting was attended by the former ministers of defence and intelligence, Joe Modise and Joe Nhlanhla, the newspaper reports. It also writes that "until recently, Nkobi Holdings, which Shaik claims he founded in a coffee shop in 1995, was involved in private and government contracts worth over R8-billion".

Bizcommunity.com columnist Gill Moodie has already pointed out that government information is to be declassified after 20 years and go up for a review of classification every 10 years. "I would venture it dawned on the ANC that the 20 years from when it won the first democratic election in 1994 was just around the corner: 2014," writes Moodie.

"And it would be best to try keep the POI Bill as broadly defined as possible (with more serious jail terms thrown in) so that ANC government information could be kept under lock and key. The bill already qualifies the provisions made for automatic declassification after 20 years as 'unless such information is classified in terms of this Act'."

Imagine what would be revealed

If a couple of old letters from Mandela's presidency can reveal this much - imagine what would be revealed when government records for the first year of his presidency become declassified in 2014?

"Arguments that the ANC wants to muzzle the print media is premised on a falsehood that the ruling party, the ANC, has no ethics, morals and values and that it does not want the media to expose some of its cadres when they are in trouble with the law, including corruption," President Zuma wrote in a letter to the media this week. published in the ANC Today newsletter. Those running the ruling party, sadly, have proved this premise is no falsehood.

Zuma takes exception at similarities being pointed out between these draconian and repressive bills and those of the apartheid regime. This, he writes, is "not only preposterous, it is also disingenuous and an unbearable insult."

Unbearable insult

It is indeed an unbearable insult, to our democratic constitution and the free citizens of this country, that these bills have progressed to the point they have in a bid to guarantee the holier-than-thou image held up by the president and his allies.

"The starting point [to the media freedom debate] is that media owners and media practitioners cannot claim that this institution is totally snow white and without fault," writes the president. Indeed it cannot, but apparently the ANC can, being the ethical, moral and virtuous organisation the president purports it to be.

No true democrat could possibly try to frame the discussion around press freedom, access to information and government accountability, as simply a discussion around media's commercial interest. Now that is disingenuous, Mr President, and a tragedy for our democratic society.