Government media conferences are denting SA's dignity

Trying to be positive and constructive in the middle of a fight is a sure recipe for disappointment.

But when it involves the passion outside of my family that I love the most, journalism, disappointment is permanent.

I was reminded of that as I watched the farce that was the media conference called last Sunday by the by now, this Sunday, totally submerged minister of social development, Bathabile Dlamini, to explain how welfare payments would be made from April 1 in light of the fact that there is no longer a contract to do so with the (private, white, outsourced) distributor.

Dlamini is a lost soul, damaged and out of her depth. Her spokeswoman was at one time reduced to reminding the assembled reporters that she was the master of ceremonies here and that she would decide who got to ask questions and what questions the minister would answer. In hindsight, the minister would have been better off had she not called the media conference.

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Afterwards social media were aflame, tut-tutting about how useless government communications are. But that is only part of the story. The fact is, the government is notoriously difficult to cover.

The media, already stretched financially, are supposed to be able to play a version of the game where you put your hands and feet on the numbers on a mat depending on the throw of a dice, until you fall over. We have to cover the government in two cities, Tshwane and Cape Town, and in the process a lot gets lost.

Mostly, what is lost is empathy, decent relationships and expertise. The sooner the ANC concentrates the government and parliament in one place, the better. Putting it all in Tshwane, close to the financial capital and home of the Constitutional Court, makes so much sense socially and financially I am still gobsmacked by the fact that it hasn't yet happened. The amount of money wasted moving the government between Tshwane and Cape Town must be immense.

There's a fix, though. When I was a correspondent in Germany in the 1980s, the journalists, not the government, ran the media conferences.

The German equivalent of the South African National Editors' Forum, financed by the media companies, seconded a few people to the Bundespressekonferenz (the federal press conference) and it was held every day at 10am in a building made available by the state in Bonn.

Any accredited journalist could attend. Normally, all the government spokesmen were there. Sometimes, if they were in the news, their ministers might join them. Sometimes they were invited. Not to make statements (although at the entrance there were always written statements from various departments you could pick up) but ready to answer questions.

Some answers turned out to be statements. The German language invites long-windedness. The "master of ceremonies" was a journalist, not a government spokesman. And you could ask what you liked. They could answer as they liked.

The beauty of the arrangement was obvious. The government departments got to say the same thing to a lot of people at the same time. The whole arrangement was transparent and open. It made it hard for the media to lie or get away with mistakes or misquotes.

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The big German papers would routinely attend (it was someone's job to attend) and if there was, say, a big defence story around, then they would send in their defence specialists as well.

We could do the same here. Not all our media owners are talking to each other but in my experience even editors with very different ideas about the country would understand that a standing state/media news conference in Cape Town and Tshwane every day and at more or less the same time would be a solid base from which to build better relationships between the media and the government.

This arrangement takes the pressure off ministers. They don't have to pitch. But the journalists (or some) do. I have little doubt the format would prove so popular that ministers would queue to attend.

The problem venue would be Tshwane. Most media houses already have people in Cape Town. But they have been wrong to take people out of Tshwane. You can't cover the government down a phone line. Governments are complicated and they know more than reporters do.

Perhaps there's an empty government building we could hire cheaply and hold "our" news conferences there.

Last Sunday with Bathabile Dlamini was the low point in media-state communications. We should make it better, and we easily can.