The power of the media is to inform and promote transparency in a murky world of corruption, yet in the same vein the media can be sensational and destructive. What does this mean for Nomvula Mabuza of IDS Africa this Women’s Month? She carries the scars of media under the stern hand of Mail & Guardian (M&G) and there has not been substantive recourse besides an apology from the publication. I had my share of M&G shenanigans without apology though.
On December 12 2003 the M&G had breaking news and I was at the centre. Stats chief probed for graft. What the headline omitted was that shortly after releasing the results of Census 2001 in July 2003, I approached then-minister Trevor Manuel about the allegations.. I asked him how to proceed because I cannot continue my work with integrity if these allegations, false of course, dangled around my neck. He advised that I see the now-late Prof Stan Sangweni, then chair of the Public Service Commission. I did and asked that Sangweni investigate me. I had been aware of these allegations for almost a year but delayed action on them because I had to deliver the census. Otherwise, the allegations and investigations would have distracted my attention.
There’s work to be done even amid the torture of such investigations. But what happens to purveyors of lies?
The Mail & Guardian was one such. They could not interrogate those who started the lies, but were too eager to hog news headlines. They did not come out with an apology or the breaking news it opened with at the end of the investigation, which found no iota of truth in the lies.
August is Women’s Month . How far have we come? Thirty-one years into democracy we witness what we lamented most as we built towards the 2010 World Cup. The classical lamentation that caught the eye and ire of the state was Lafarge’s delayed response to deliver cement from the bowels of South Africa. Instead South Africa had to import cement it had in abundance from Tanzania for the Build SA programme.
The second was the skills shortages, especially in welding and boiler-making, to deliver on the steel and aluminium works to lead and bolster an economy that for at least five consecutive years had broken into 5% growth. It was with a sense of achievement that in his State of the Nation Addressthen-president Thabo Mbeki would say: “I feel emboldened to appropriate for our people the promise contained in the Book of the Prophet Isaiah, when God said: ‘For you shall go out with joy. And be led out in peace; the mountains and the hills Shall break forth into singing before you. And all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress tree. And instead of the briar shall come up the myrtle tree.”
If the promise of democracy in honouring the 1956 Women’s March was their deserved liberation in all respects and fundamentally economically, we owe them a commitment to reverse and remedy the trip that starts at 3am and ends at 8pm back in KwaNdebele after toiling from 7am am to 4pm in suburbia of Pretoria.
Women’s Month is when we have to reflect on the struggles of women from not only the seminal 1956 Women’s March to the Union Buildings, but their daily march to suburbs on buses and taxis from Kwa-Ndebele to Pretoria to serve the historically white, increasingly wealthy middle class and now the increasingly squeezed and disappearing black middle class. The fact is the Women’s March has just begun seven decades on.
Memorialising is crucial for development of a nation. In this journey of nation building many bricks are arranged to build and many are pulled off the building through wanton destruction. But the journey to build should not be abandoned, and against all odds must continue. This month I have isolated the story of Mabuza, a wordsmith writing with clarity on development issues in the Business Report. Her column is at its best when she challenges readers on development challenges and solutions. She is also an ardent development practitioner. She is a community builder who runs an artisanal school that trains boilermakers. She is addressing the hitherto unanswered call of Accelerated & Shared Growth Initiative for SA (AsgiSA). This question should be central to our somewhat faltering national dialogue.
If the promise of democracy in honouring the 1956 Women’s March was their deserved liberation in all respects and fundamentally economically, we owe them a commitment to reverse and remedy the trip that starts at 3am and ends at 8pm back in KwaNdebele after toiling from 7am to 4pm in Pretoria suburbia. The story is the same in all our metropolitan areas, where the apartheid past still runs in the blood vessels of liberation.
Besides the systematic destruction of the apartheid infrastructure which intensified in the past 10 years of democracy marked by a decline in the supply of water, energy, rail passenger trips, road infrastructure and general breakdown of law and order, we need to reflect on the seven decades of the Women’s March through the lens of participation in the state-owned enterprises.
Almost two decades later M&G led with the story of Mabusa of IDS. This is an interesting story and needs a fine comb as we reflect on Women’s Month.
The context of South Africa’s squeezed and dwindling middle class is especially important, where those who confronted and accepted the challenge gallantly should be embraced, but the media innuendo continues to destroy them, with the gullible public singing but the knowing white capital applauding and benefiting from the destruction. Even when these blacks are exonerated from a web of lies, they are left under the bus as the white careerist capital marches forward.
The evidence of the relationship of IDS with Eskom is far deeper than catches the media hype that alleged that Mabuza got contracts at Eskom because she was a relative of the late Jabu Mabuza. While Mail & Guardian retracted the statement and apologised for propagating a false story, a once-promising and successful women-led company that dared to challenge not only male spaces but white and foreign-dominated space at Eskom, faces peril. Women’s Month must as a matter of not only principle and women’s emancipation, but of the very essence of the national dialogue and national development imperatives, pause and explain itself to IDS and many such cases.
The question of blood relatives and its integrity seem to be much thicker for blacks and lighter for whites when it comes to contracting more generally and at Eskom in the case of Nomvula. An independent report found Eskom’s Jan Oberholzer to have violated Eskom’s policy by negotiating a contact for Gregory Jacobs, his brother in law. A barrage of allegations continued but without consequence to Oberholzer. Now Oberholzer's Mulilo is a beneficiary of a R9bn contract as preferred IPP bidder.
One such modern-day March to the Union Building is the black-women-led journey that specialises in mechanical construction and engineering, but in particular the boiler maintenance sector, which was the point ofAsgiSA that IDS decided to set its eyes on. Top on the agenda of AsgiSA was skills development. Did we stay the course?
Twenty years later in 2025, the Southern African Institute of Welding published a plan that seeks to elevate the expansion of skills in welding. Not only does the report point to what little we have done in this important area but more devastatingly what the SOEs and Eskom could be doing to the likes of IDS, where despite the M&G accepting that associating Nomvula Mabuza with the late Jabu Mabuza in the work that IDS was doing at Eskom, was regrettable.There has not been remedy to restore the efforts of IDS at Eskom — the only blackwomen-led boilermaker company, if not only at Eskom but probably in the whole of South Africa.
The only hyperbolic response from business leadership is when Eskom takes on the National Energy Regulator of South Africa on regulatory decisions. There are deeply flawed decisions that we are taking as a country that seriously undermine its development. No stone should be left unturned especially at the SOEs.
• Dr Pali Lehohla is a professor of practice at the University of Johannesburg, a research associate at Oxford University, a board member of Institute for Economic Justice at Wits and a distinguished alumni of the University of Ghana. He is the former statistician-general of SA
For opinion and analysis consideration, email opinions@timeslive.co.za
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