TOM EATON | How the bizarre ‘Unmasking Project’ fell flat on its face

Satire is dead but sometimes it twitches, and this week “Independent” owner Iqbal Survé gave it a solid jolt as he roped in a desperate former cabinet minister, staged an absurd press conference, and proudly and publicly condemned a completely innocent man.

A lot has already been written about Survé’s much-hyped “Unmasking Project”, and how it managed to fall flat on its face at the very first hurdle by doxing the wrong “Goolam”; but a couple of highlights did stand out.

The first was IOL editor Lance Witten proclaiming that the whole point of the project was to go after low-lifes “responsible for the destruction of individuals though defamation and disinformation”, even as his company tried to destroy an innocent man through defamation and disinformation.

Honestly, I’ve written jokes for a long time but that kind of irony is special.

The other standout was Lindiwe Sisulu blithely mentioning that when she was minister of intelligence under Thabo Mbeki, “we bugged everyone”. I don’t blame Independent for failing to use this as a scoop across all their titles — to realise it was a scoop, there would have had to have been a journalist in the room — but still, it was a fairly dramatic claim.

After all, if Sisulu is telling the truth, then she’s admitting to having overseen illegal surveillance of private citizens, which means she’s a profoundly dodgy character, and one shouldn’t believe a single word she says about anything; or she’s lying, in which case she’s a liar.

Either way, she looked right at home with Survé’s team.

Of course, that wasn’t the end of the fiasco. On Wednesday, as soon as they figured out that they’d outed the wrong Goolam, Independent Media editor-in-chief Adri Senekal De Wet and CEO Viasen Soobramoney posted a video to social media in which they apologised, blaming a “technical error”, which seems like a pretty mean thing to call your boss.

However, they assured a laughing nation, they had found the real Goolam, whose allegedly Machiavellian schemes would soon be revealed, perhaps in the same press conference where they give us an update on that squad of very special three-year-olds Survé introduced to us as the Tembisa Decuplets.

So why did this clown show happen? I suspect the answer lies in a kind of Venn diagram of shared grievances and mutual desperation.

Survé has never disguised his company’s support for the Jacob Zuma camp of the ANC. His titles openly backed Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma against Cyril Ramaphosa, and it’s possible that some of the sweetheart deals he secured during the Zuma presidency — most notably his gigantic loan from the Public Investment Corporation — might be fraying at the edges as the ANC disintegrates.

As the walls start closing in, critics like Goolam must be utterly infuriating, especially for someone who has surrounded himself with sycophants.

For her part, Sisulu explained that she was there to get revenge on Goolam, who, she said, had hurt her chances of becoming ANC president. Because obviously it was one anonymous Twitter account that sank her career, and not the rest of the ANC finally seeing how little she had to offer.

It’s also cold outside the ANC, and it’s possible she was using the junket as yet another audition for that cushy role she just can’t seem to land. I mean, it’s been two years since she wrote her op-ed slandering the South African judiciary, and if you want Zuma to notice you, you can’t rest on your past journalistic laurels. You need to get in front of some cameras, stat.

Yes, the “Unmasking Project” will no doubt bubble along for a few weeks until Survé and Sisulu are appeased. But sometimes you don’t need special unmasking projects to reveal exactly who people are.