EUSEBIUS MCKAISER | The IFP wants unconditional love, so it's protesting against a 'lowly newspaper man'

What is the point of the IFP? If anyone knows, I would love you to tell me. For months, I have been ruminating over this, and delaying critical engagement with historical material on the party and talking to its leadership. Sporadic electoral successes in KwaZulu-Natal, for example, seem as much a consequence of ANC and DA missteps as anything intentional and coherent that the IFP is doing, politically. What and who are they in modern SA?

A press statement from the IFP caught my eye and deserves some serious attention, but let's take a break from that assignment and tackle some wild stuff the party is organising.

On Friday the IFP is doing something stupid. They will be marching on the offices of City Press to protest against “the abuse” by  the paper's editor Mondli Makhanya”. The party has accused him of “masquerading as a journalist” and has “harboured a personal political grudge against the IFP” for decades. 

Citing Anthea Jeffery's book, The People's War, the IFP  says Makhanya “participated in the black-on-black violence of the past”, and took “pleasure participating and seeing IFP members maimed”. They claim Makhanya breaches “his own editorial code of conduct”  peddling “unsubstantiated opinions and blatant lies, particularly about the IFP’s founder and president emeritus Prince Buthelezi”. And so the party is going to march to the City Press offices and make unspecified demands. Here is why the planned actions are stupid.

Your commitment to freedom of the press and conscience is not demonstrated by your press statement. That is no more convincing than a wife-beater insisting he is opposed to gender-based violence.

What you do, rather than what you claim to stand for, tells us about who you truly are. In this case, the plan of the IFP tells us it is intolerant of speech rights, and of criticism of the ‘president emeritus’. It is no small thing for an entire political party to be unleashed against a journalist. That smacks of overreach in response to provocation, and even of political thuggery.

I happen to think Makhanya is an entertaining, and usefully provocative and often very cogent, scribe. It does not follow that I agree with everything he writes.

The best way to embarrass Makhanya is to win the argument. Protesting at the offices of a newspaper is not an argument. It is intimidation. All the guy did, and has been doing, is writing columns about Buthelezi’s political past and personal history. Some readers are titillated for sure. Many simply are amused by the editor’s discursive preoccupation with Buthelezi. Still others share the IFP’s view that Makhanya is obsessed with the founding leader of the IFP, and maybe even that he has an unhealthy crush on him. But that is the point, in a way, isn’t it?

We each, as readers with brains, judge the work of writers, journalists, columnists, and editors for ourselves. I happen to think Makhanya is an entertaining, and usefully provocative and often very cogent, scribe. It does not follow that I agree with everything he writes. Saying this should be trite, quite frankly. Agreement is not a precondition for liking someone’s work. Agreement is also not a precondition for accepting someone’s right to their view.

On Buthelezi, for example, I am bored with ‘this lowly newspaperman’ going on about the IFP with gay abandon. But the IFP must leave me to judge the editor to be overwriting on the subject rather than marching on the offices of the newspaper as if fearing readers cannot distinguish bullshit from evidence-based argument. Leave it to the marketplace of ideas to debate what the fairest historical view of the ‘president emeritus’ is. Enter the arena of argument IFP rather than the arena where the newspaper is located.

The press statement, for example, is so lame and devoid of critical engagement, it neither tells us what Makhanya has written that they disagree with, nor does it even hint at refutation. It simply contains personal attacks, and signals, presumably to its members and supporters here in Johannesburg, to get ready to gather and march next Friday. That is pathetic, antithetical to the ideals and express values of our constitutional democracy, and most of all — without a hint of irony — a verbal performance of the kind of violence the IFP is accusing Makhanya of being implicated in.

How do you take the moral high ground by wanting to gag an interlocutor, and aiming to have a chilling effect on speech rights?

What should the IFP have done instead? Simple. Either nothing and leaving it to me as a reader to roll my eyes at Makhanya and move along with the rest of my Sunday after scanning City Press. Or, by simply writing a stunning response. The SA media is very accessible.

Furthermore, with new media, you do not even need an editor’s permission to write a response to something in their publication before you are able to do so anyway and distribute it quickly and widely across all sorts of channels where the traditional editor is not in charge, but where their readers will see your response to what had appeared on the original platform. The IFP is not hated by the media. Radio and TV channels, plus City Press itself, would happily provide ample space for IFP leadership, or any academic or intellectual, to deconstruct Makhanya’s view of Buthelezi.

Many platforms would host a debate even. Aim to defeat the editor intellectually, with logic, and evidence, and by outshining him rhetorically. That is what democrats do in a society founded on a commitment to speech rights including vigorous debate. But the IFP, it seems, wants to be loved unconditionally rather than embracing deep and open disagreement including, as such, a willingness to debate the historical record.

If Makhanya is so obviously wrong, why not calmly demonstrate, sentence-by-sentence, where his writing falls flat? Why are you so touched by obvious falsehoods? It is mind-boggling. I want to hear the IFP communications team getting into the substance of the issues rather than, as this press statement does, speaking around the editor’s claims, and simply labelling him someone who is “masquerading” as a journalist. That is not argument, and certainly not refutation.

Colourful ad hominem responses are at best entertaining but do not show up the views held by the person you are insulting. And, by the way, if the IFP itself thinks all Makhanya is engaging in is slander of Buthelezi that is devoid of evidence, that too can and should be pointed out clinically and logically. Instead, the party is opting for tit-for-tat, bile-filled responses. There is nothing politically savvy about how the IFP is handling this.  

The way in which, in turn, we respond as writers, editors, journalists and even artists, to such intolerance from the subjects of our work, matters. I was reminded, and dug up debates about, Brett Murray’s The Spear, which played out ten years ago. The painting depicted then president Jacob Zuma, with his genitalia exposed, in a stance reminiscent of Vladimir Lenin. ANC leaders, falling over themselves to suck up to Zuma, expressed rage at Murray, the art gallery that hosted the work, and newspapers that published the image of the painting. Sidekicks of Zuma were out-chanting each other in a chorus of “Don’t buy City Press! DON’T BUY!”

Feeling slighted is not a sufficient reason to have someone’s view of you, either in the form of a column or a work of art, censored.

The then editor Ferial Haffajee made a massive error, in my view, succumbing to the pressure, by deciding to take the image off their website. Others like my Arena Holdings colleague Peter Bruce were unusually coy too, arguing that Zuma did “not deserve” the depiction, and City Press should not, on grounds of taste alone, have published the image in the first place. These editorial views, to my mind still today, are not very sober.

Feeling slighted is not a sufficient reason to have someone’s view of you, either in the form of a column or a work of art, censored. The Murray saga should remain a lesson to creatives to not run away from intolerant people who cannot fathom the idea of a vast range of views about them, some flattering, some fiercely negative even, and some indifferent or falling along the spectrum of possibilities. That is what happens in discourse. It is part of what we signed up for, and for good reason, when we built a liberal democratic edifice.

Obviously, the right to dignity cannot be limited under any circumstances. The mistake we should not make, however, is to interpret the right to dignity to mean that I have a right not to be offended.

Any editor, artist, journalist, or writer who does not fight for the space to offend their subject will regret ceding irrational ground to those who are intolerant of our work. This is why there must be support for Makhanya and City Press rather than indifference or silence from other media houses. If they can plan a march on City Press, they can again target an artist or a cartoonist or another broadcaster or columnist. Ironically, Bruce himself now knows how horrid it is when political thugs who are intolerant of speech rights invade your private space, as a lazy substitute for entering the arena of argument. We must defend our right to make a ‘president emeritus’ feel upset about our take on their place in history.

The IFP can always, at any rate, take Makhanya to the press ombud and test their claim that there are press code violations in his print media content. In this instance, however, they do have a high bar to overcome. Our jurisprudence is solid and sensible on what constitutes “fair comment” which is why Justice Edwin Cameron, in the case of Robert McBride vs The Citizen, argued that “criticism [of a public figure] is protected, even if extreme, unjust, unbalanced, exaggerated and prejudiced, so long as it expresses an honestly held opinion, without malice, on a matter of public interest on facts that are true.” The newspaper had labelled McBride a criminal and murderer.

Furthermore, argued Cameron, even if the view of the newspaper was distasteful or vengeful, “it is good for democracy, good for social life and good for individuals to permit maximally open and vigorous discussion of public affairs.” So, imputing even vengeful motive to Makhanya — or regarding The Spear as ‘distasteful’ — does not constitute sufficient grounds to conclude that we are witnessing fundamental rights violations.

The bottom line is that the IFP should simply demolish the falsehoods it sees in the work of Makhanya by engaging in open and evidence-informed debate on the substantive historical issues.

Marching to City Press, however, is at best an utter waste of time and at worst a misguided and vicious attempt to intimidate someone whose views you do not like or do not agree with.

The IFP is bored, desperate to be in the news, scared of a debate with Makhanya on the veracity of his claims, or not committed to speech rights. All of these are embarrassing outcomes for the IFP, and needlessly so. Which makes me even more curious to seek an answer to my homework question, “What is the point of the IFP?” 

Support independent journalism by subscribing to the Sunday Times. Just R20 for the first month.