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Out with the old, scrutinize the new

Thursday, January 15, 2009

A DEPARTING PRESIDENT, THIS one white, insists on saying yet another televised farewell today. (More of that later - though not too much more ... we've all had enough already, right?)  Meanwhile a president-in-waiting, this one black, may have his assumption of office blocked, even at this late date, by a cloud of alleged corruption.

No, of course I don't mean Barack Obama. I mean Jacob Zuma in South Africa - leader of the ruling African National Congress party, and its candidate for the national presidency when elections take place within the next few months. He's rarely off the front pages, naturally, but he suddenly has every medium in that nation's lively communications landscape pulsating anew since the Supreme Court of Appeal this week ruled that previously-laid charges against him of racketeering, money-laundering, corruption and fraud) should be re-instated, charges that a lower court had dismissed on a legal technicality.

 

The apparent shoo-in for presidency of Africa's political and economic powerhouse could now conceivably find himself prosecuted, and even facing a lengthy prison sentence.

 

Zuma's business associate, Schabir Shaik, is already serving 15 years for soliciting bribes on Zuma's behalf. In other criminal proceedings, Zuma was cleared of raping a friend's daughter. South African politics have changed quite a bit since Nelson Mandela's day.

 

I was recently offered some unsolicited insights into the forthcoming elections, when I happened to change planes in Johannesburg. I had to move between terminals in the rapidly expanding airport whose name I now rejoice in every time I'm there. It was once called Jan Smuts Airport, in memory of the Boer War figure who infamously declared "it has been our ideal to make South Africa a white man's country". Since 2006 it has honored the late Oliver Tambo, the ANC president who, in typically gracious and selfless style, stepped aside in favor of the heroically lauded Mandela when his friend finally emerged from prison.

 

To avoid imprisonment himself Tambo had to spend 32 years in exile, and during one of our frequent talks over his kitchen table in Muswell Hill, north London, he once told me: "There's no debate to be had. Nelson will be our President".

 

Last month, trundling my baggage up an outdoor ramp below Tambo's name spelled out in eight-feet high letters, I was closely followed by two construction workers who animatedly discussed the splitting-off from the ANC of a whole new political party, COPE, the Congress of the People. The split followed Zuma's effective toppling of the country's second President, Thabo Mbeki. "COPE is just sour grapes from the elite that was tied to Mbeki" said one worker, "Only the ANC can ever be champion of the real people". The other man was adamant that COPE deserved a chance at the polls: "Power that cannot be challenged always leads to corruption".

 

I reached my terminal's doors, and they veered off to the asphalt-spraying truck they were heading for, still arguing. I recalled my struggle-wearied host as he quietly emphasized back in the 1980s that the ANC was a "broad coalition" made up of "very different sectors of society and traditions", which was held together by fighting a common enemy. He fully expected that after liberation South Africa would develop into a complex tableau of differing political forces.

 

But I don't think Oliver Tambo ever thought it would turn out quite like this.

 

   

 

** EVERY WEEK CONNECTICUT'S NPR STATION, WHDD (ROBIN HOOD RADIO) AIRS A DISCUSSION BASED ON THIS COLUMN - Fridays at 7.35 am, and Saturdays at 4.45 pm.**

 

Listen to THE MEDIA BEAT podcasts by clicking HERE.

  

 

  

 

A DISHEARTENING GUIDE TO what to expect in today's broadcast to the American nation was provided by George W Bush's final press conference - a study in posing which, tellingly, prompted both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times to record the event on their front pages not with a single picture, but rather with combinations of mini-portraits (the Times version, above left). These contrived to run the gamut of expressions from preening ... to more preening.

 

Video captured an extraordinary hall-of-mirrors moment when this monumentally self-consumed man attempted to ridicule the ludicrousness of a president asking self-pityingly "Why did the financial collapse have to happen on my watch?" He suddenly acted the part of such a self-pitying president with such demonstrative conviction that it was hard not to suspect he is in reality as self-pitying as he is self-consumed. (He also pointed out that Obama - get this - is unlikely to be affected by self-pity.)

 

                                   

 

In all the Bush legacy-dissection that currently dominates the media, too little attention has been paid to the assessment of Bush's own "brain" - the Fox News commentator who once carried the label presidential counsellor - Karl Rove. When it comes to gauging the political currents at play in the 2008 election, Bush himself has told TV audiences (through ABC's Charlie Gibson, and this time with understandable self-centeredness) that "I'm sure some people voted for Barack Obama because of me". 

 

But Rove has judged that, even given Bush's devastating slump in popularity, it was Obama's ground-game that clinched his victory. While allowing for some self-serving arrogance of Rove's own, it remains true that the Bush team's earlier success with targeting vulnerable elements in the opposing side's expected support (like Latinos and blue-collar Democrats) was copied and built upon by the Obama camp. Rove has imagined the Obamites saying:  "We're going to study what Bush did, and the army of persuasion, and duplicate it  -  and we're going to go out and try and get small but significant slices of what the other guy's coalition was in the past two elections".

   

 

A FOOTNOTE, AGAIN FROM AFRICA, ON PRESIDENTIAL TRANSITIONS. Ghana's new leader John Atta Mills is now finally installed, after a cliff-hanger contest (that was highlighted in a recent edition of THE MEDIA BEAT bemoaning in my familar fashion the scanty coverage in our western media).

 

The Ghanaian national elections had gone to a second round because the winner's nearest rival, Nana Akufo-Addo had come so close - a challenger who represented the previously incumbent political party, instructively enough. The tight contest inevitably entailed noisy disturbances and much tension nationwide, but in the end there was calm resolution. (A happy young Mills supporter is pictured above right.)

 

This quiet outcome has challenged, like every peaceful African election does, the common media caricature of the political landscape right across the continent - that it's riddled with instability, corruption and violence.

 

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