Quintal plus COSATU Socio-Economic Resolutions

“Framing” means the artificial context into which a newspaper story is placed. It is a ready-made substitute for the specific “back story” or true past history which the journalist omits to supply. The Independent Group’s Political Editor Angela Quintal frames her stories in a relentlessly monotonous way. A report from Quintal concerning Ngoako Ramatlhodi’s alleged statements at the ANC Free State Provincial General Council (PGC) appeared in yesterday’s Star (see link below). Quintal’s “intro” (first paragraph) quickly insists that this is a story of somebody “calling for unity and discipline amid the latest crisis”. You are supposed to think that Ramatlhodi must be suppressed - or else the sky will fall down. For Quintal South African life is a constant replay of this same phoney “crisis” story using a limited and all-too-familiar set of props. There are imaginary “camps” (“Zuma camp”, “Mbeki camp”). These camps are supposed to be contending for an ineffable “power”, which for Quintal can only mean the capacity to boss people around, or alternatively to apply bourgeois discipline with a firm smack. Quintal’s facts are massaged into her pre-set “framing” with liberal verbal lubrication, with cuts to fit, and typically with the trick known as “the passive voice” - whereby the subject, or agent of an action, is turned conveniently into an object. So Quintal has the President “under siege” by an invisible army. The President’s absence abroad, the headline says, “forces delay” of a meeting. An absence becomes a force. And so on. (We will discuss Subject and Object more next week using some of James Heartfield’s writings). The actual meeting in question could only be the routine, mundane, Monday gathering of ANC office bearers that Jacob Zuma frequently mentions. Once you know that, and also bear in mind that yesterday was a holiday in South Africa, the frantic pace of Quintal’s narrative becomes absurd. To be fair to Quintal the essential fact behind the story does get a brief mention among her 600 breathless words. She allows, ever so briefly, that Ramatlhodi lost out politically after the Scorpions investigated him, leaked the investigation, and then refrained from charging him. In other words the Penuell Maduna/Bulelani Ngcuka regime at the NPA gave Ramatlhodi the “Hollywood” treatment. But now Jacob Zuma with the support of COSATU, the SACP, the ANC Youth League, the Young Communist League, the ANC itself plus countless ordinary South African citizens of goodwill and common sense, have faced down the illegitimate use of state institutions for the purpose of “power” politics. So Ngoako Ramatlhodi was made bold to speak up in his own cause. This happened at the ANC Free Sate PGC. It was not any kind Machiavellian intrigue. On the contrary it was a denunciation of intrigue. We should hope that many more of the victims of the “Hollywood” purges are now going to speak out openly, as Ramatlhodi has done, because the Quintals will not do it. They prefer to blame the victims. All this is not to say that President Mbeki does not have egg all over his face during the declining years of his presidency. While Maduna and Ngcuka were running wild, the President said nothing against them. The press and broadcast media happily drummed up support for the purges, even though the victims were, as often as not, just as bourgeois as themselves. They lent their pages and cameras freely for the public smears and did not trouble to ask why prosecutions so seldom followed. Mbeki in particular kept quiet while a letter he had written and sent to a parliamentary committee via the hand of Jacob Zuma (in the latter’s capacity of head of government business) was used in evidence against Schabir Shaik to establish the phantasm of a “generally corrupt relationship” with Zuma, a category never heard of before in law. By means of this stratagem (plus the flimsy “encrypted fax”, which Judge Msimang rightly called “notorious”) a pretext was cobbled together. This was to enable Mbeki to sack Zuma from his position as Deputy President of the country and to appoint Ngcuka’s wife Phumzile in Zuma’s place. Except that Mbeki said “release”, not “sack”. Presidents also use the “passive voice”. Later on Mbeki found it prudent to admit his authorship of the letter, lamely adding that Shaik’s defence lawyers had never asked him about it. In other words he sat on his hands while Maduna and Ngcuka went about their skulduggery. Our struggle is not to give “power” to one boss or another. It has nothing to do with “camps”. Our struggle is to render the people of the country powerful as a mass collective subject, and as the only legitimate historical agent. This is called democracy. Sitting in the midst of the frank, loud, open, astonishing mass democracy of the COSATU 9th National Congress last week, Angela Quintal hardly noticed it. What she did notice was that Ngoako Ramatlhodi was briefly present, and so was SACP GS Blade Nzimande. Among the thousands of delegates, international guests, government ministers, and all the rest, the decisions taken, and the leaders elected to office, Quintal figured that the significant thing was the presence of these two in that vast hall. Surely they must have been conspiring, she thought! Writers who like the Bourbon Kings of France “learn nothing and forget nothing” are simply useless. The Communist University aims to learn from history, not ignore it. Among the resolutions passed by the COSATU 9th Congress are the ones linked here below. Once again, these texts are still not perfected in terms of numbering, spelling, punctuation etc. But when the press “medium is the message” it becomes necessary to contradict that false message and to get down at once to studying events using what we ourselves produce, raw as it may be. The COSATU 9th Congress meant business. It took decisions. Revolutionary democrats must take note of these decisions and act on them with all possible speed. Click on these links: Absent Mbeki forces delay, Angela Quintal, The Star (602 words) COSATU Resolutions: 9th Congress, Socio-Economic, 1 of 11, Jobs and poverty campaign (1594 words) 9th Congress, Socio-Economic, 2 of 11, Import-parity pricing (254 words) 9th Congress, Socio-Economic, 3 of 11, State involvement in the economy (346 words) 9th Congress, Socio-Economic, 4 of 11, Farm workers (800 words) 9th Congress, Socio-Economic, 6 of 11, Broad-Based Black BEE (571 words)