By: Andile Lungisa
STRATCOM media network exposed “We have maintained a silence closely resembling stupidity’- Junta Tuitiva, La Paz, Bolivia. 16 July 1809.
The emperor of SA media industry is Koos Bekker, the current chairman and former CEO of Naspers: the biggest company in Africa, and the parent company of News 24, Takealot, Multichoice, City Press, Rapport, Die Burger, Die Son, MWeb and a plethora of other well known publications. The human owners of Naspers are not known, even though it is a listed company, but we know Koos Bekker is the chairman. Naspers was founded in 1915, in South Africa, by Jannie Marais of Coetsenburg and W.A. Hofmeyr, with the support of Jan Christiaan Smuts, Louis Botha, and National Party founding president J.B.M. Hertzog.
If Koos Bekker’s immense wealth and online intelligence gathering capability makes him the emperor of SA ‘s journalistic war machine , then Adriaan Basson of Koos’s News 24, and “professor”
Anton Harber of Wits/Enca/Mail & Guardian, are the dogs of war. Anton Harber is the founding editor of The Weekly Mail, a known right leaning newspaper, parading as leftist, and which none of the born-frees would have heard of. This is because the Weekly Mail changed its name to The Mail and Guardian. Today the Mail & Guardian is owned by a New York based non-profit investment company. Anton Harber, with no masters degree of his own, was the Caxton professor of journalism
at Wits University, later termed the “adjunct professor” of journalism, but still at Wits University. Presumably Caxton Media must have had something to do the position of Caxton Professor of Journalism at Wits. Caxton Media themselves merged with Perskor, the mouthpiece of the northern
element of the National party, whilst Naspers represented the southern element of the National Party. Caxton also owns the Citizen as well as the Zululand Observer ( where journalist Kyle Cowan cut his teeth) and a host of other publications around the country and with a readership base in the
millions.
At Wits, “professor adjunct” Anton Harber simultaneously chairs the Taco Kuiper Awards for investigative journalism. Some of his former panelists judging the winners of the award are Judge Tom Cloete and Justice Malala. They invoke the name of Taco Kuiper and place it as a crown of
righteousness upon the heads of their future journalistic hitmen. The man who most sings the praises of Taco Kuiper is none other than the notoriously racist journalist David Bullard. Among the winners of the Taco Kuiper award are Adriaan Basson and Carien du Plessis for their 2006 articles on DCS contracts with Bosasa. Both were later employed by Mail & Guardian, with Adriaan Basson becoming editor of Mail & Guardian eventually: The paper that was founded by Anton Harber.
Another winner of the Taco Kuiper Award is Pieter Louie Myburgh from Daily Maverick, who got the award in 2016 for his writings about Prasa, and his book Gangster State on Ace Magashule was also FUNDED by a Taco Kuiper GRANT: so Anton Harber pops up again. He writes on his Twitter on March 31: “we @Journ_SA_ @Wits are proud to have supported this important book with a Taco Kuiper Grant for investigative reporting”. The Daily Maverick also has Jacques Pauw as one of its
contributors. He regularly, venomously attacks ANC leaders on an unsubstantiated basis.
In 2008 a team including Adriaan Basson and Stefaans Brummer of Mail & Guardian win the Taco Kuiper Award for their 2007 articles on Jackie Selebi. In the same year they received a Mondi SHANDUKA award for the same articles on Jackie Selebi.
Adriaan’s former editor at Mail & Guardian who made way for Adriaan to take over there, is none other than Ferial Haffajee: Adriaan Basson’s greatest praise singer after Kyle Cowan at News 24. Ferial happens to be a former student at Wits, where Anton Harber studied and lectured. Ferial made her name in journalism as editor of Mail&Guardian from 2004-2009, the same paper founded by Anton Harber. In 2009, Ferial moved to editor of City Press, owned by Naspers. Ferial was also
editor-at-large of HuffPost South Africa until it ended its partnership with Media 24 in 2018. Ferial is known to sing from the exact same hymn sheet as Adriaan, to lend credibility that a “non-white” journalist at a different newspaper agrees with everything he says. Ferial is now assistant editor at
Daily Maverick.
In 2017, rumours started hitting media headlines that Multichoice had paid R100 million worth of kickbacks to SABC and Gupta-owned ANN7 and that Multichoice attempted to influence government’s policy on top-box encryption. Koos bekker came to the defense of his company Multichoice and said he saw nothing criminal. Anton Harber, simultaneously working as editor of ENCA, gave commentary on social media and on Radio 702 opining how brave Adriaan Basson and News 24 were for going ahead and publishing the reports of Multichoice corruption even though they are sister companies. Months later, the trail goes dead. The “pitbull” of SA journalism, Adriaan Basson surprisingly doesn’t pursue the trail any further.
Enter Kyle Cowan, who is a curious case in his own right: His own LinkedIN profile says he worked as a journalist at a newspaper owned by Caxton Media: Zululand observer April 2015-Feb 2017 (1 year 11 months), then he moves to Times Media Group Feb 2017 – May 2018 ( 1 year 4 months), 29 November 2017 Kyle Cowan writes an article headlined “Multichoice denies R100 million ‘kickbacks’ to SABC, and within 7 months, in June 2018, he leaves his employer to join News 24 (sister company to Multichoice) to work with editor Adriaan Basson. Still during 2018 Kyle Cowan makes a meteoric rise to fame by scooping the Taco Kuiper Award. In the awards speech made by Harber, he
says Cowan’s “was brave work, tackling some of the most powerful political figures, executed with thoroughness.” Which powerful political figures does he speak of? People more powerful than Kyle
Cowan’s employer Koos Bekker, chairman of the biggest company in Africa?
Adriaan Basson, is the purported “pitbull” of online news: Media 24, and Anton Harber is seemingly the elder statesman of all journalism and news in South Africa. The toxic twins together go around creating from dust the journalistic narrative of the country, each with their own online praise singers, typically an army of these anonymous “yes-man” journalists that come to their defense with every article they publish. They work as comfortable bedfellows with a well funded, well heeled
commission-agent bourgeoise in South Africa: African politicians, public figures, religious figures like archbishops emeritus, academics and such, (some of whom have infiltrated even the ANC) and who legitimize the Afro-pessimistic “investigations” of the SA journalism community. This agenda is carefully constructed by people like Anton Harber, who has received no award, no accolades, is never acknowledged, who is indeed an unsung “hero” of the old regime.…
Except for ONE occasion where there was a small rupture, a hemorrhage, a disruption: and that disruption came in the form of Winnie Mandela, who mentioned Anton Harber in her final interview before she died where she spoke about Stratcom and said Anton Harber “practically did Stratcom’s job for them”.
Anton Harber, Ferial Haffajee, Kyle Cowan, Adriaan Basson, Carien Du Plessis, Stefaans Brummer among others, who move back and forth via osmosis between these media giants of Naspers, Caxton
Media, Enca et al, know the most important trick in the book: have a trail of articles written by yourself which make it look like you are not at all guilty of your sins. Its in the first lesson in the handbook of being a double agent or agent provocateur. The list is not exhaustive and Daily Maverick and its journalists and contributors are one of the many in the broad front aimed at the
destruction of the ANC programme.
It has been said that the greatest trick the devil ever pulled, was to convince the world he doesn’t exist. Anton Harber has done this with aplomb. He dishes out the award that launches the next famous journalist in SA. They get editorships at newspapers he created, he gives financial grants for them to write their books about ANC members and helps promote their books on popular
media. Then, when they’ve really turned out to be good investments, they get to move up to the next level out of his old faithful incubator of journalistic mercenaries, Caxton media, and into the Pantheon of powerbrokers and kingmakers, Naspers. If you need to get a television interview like
Adriaan Basson needs from time to time, then Anton Harber or any of the other journalists and editors hand-reared by him could edit any newspaper or television time slot to accommodate such.
It is important to see the media war machinery not as separate companies with different shareholders and different CEO’s, but rather as Hyenas from the same pack, with the same familial DNA. They have their hierarchies, but it’s all within the context of a pack, a herd, a tribe.
Is it any wonder that Huffpost, who did that famous final interview with Winnie Mandela, fell out with News 24 and is today defunct? Is it because they gave Winnie a platform to expose Anton Harber and Stratcom? The answer if self evident.
A quick look on wikipedia shows the following: He was the Chair of the South African Conference of Editors in 1991, the Chair of the National Association of Broadcasters in 1998, and the chair of the
Freedom of Expression Institute in 2010. He serves on the board of directors of the Global Investigative Journalism Network. If you then check what the Global Investigative Journalism Network is: The Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN) is “an international association of
nonprofit organizations that support, promote and produce investigative journalism”. Its membership is open to nonprofits, NGOs, and educational organizations that are active in investigative reporting and data journalism. As of March 2018, GIJN had 177 member organizations in 76 countries.
The controllers of the media and its Stratcom agenda know that as Sun Tzu said in the Art of War: to subdue your enemy without having to fight is the acme of skill. If the ANC buries their heads in fear, in the hope that this will all just go away, then the ANC is mistaken. NGO’s with anonymous financiers are already funding local newspapers. The Daily Maverick, Mail & Guardian, Groundup and
an army of media brands and platforms are already receiving funding from Non-Government Organisations that answer to faceless foreign masters. They hide behind convoluted cross-holdings between private companies and non-profit financiers about which very little information can be
found. These amorphous NGO’s are replacing the personal names of the puppet masters on shareholder records. The patriarchs of the media war machinery are slowly erasing from the political
and corporate crime scenes their fingerprints and their footsteps.
Soon we will not be able to identify who is attacking, as we will not know the owners of any of the entities that attack us. It would be like trying to chop the head off of a headless snake. The ANC can be sure that the bloodless revolution of 1994 is in danger of being reversed. The dream of a
transformed and inclusive South African economy that we all fought for will not die with a bang, but with a whimper. When the revolution is finally reversed, nobody will even hear it die. It will be as though it never existed. Our children will be sent back to ‘Babylon’ to live as slaves and drawers of
water and hewers of wood.
“For its foreign masters and for our commission-agent bourgeoisie, who have sold their souls to the devil for a price that would’ve shamed Faust, the system is perfectly rational; but for no one else,
since the more it develops, the greater its disequilibrium, its tensions, and its contradictions.” – Eduardo Galeano, The Open Veins of Latin America.
Andile Lungisa is ANC councillor in the Nelson Mandela Bay Metro
