Jacob Zuma’s state visit last week gave South Africans an opportunity to compare China’s emerging economy to their own. The comparison was not favourable. South Africa’s economy has only just emerged from recession and almost a quarter of the working-age population are unemployed. The country’s public servants have been on strike for the last two weeks, abandoning schools and hospitals to demand an 8.6% pay increase. The dispute threatens to tear apart the ruling African National Congress’s alliance with the South African Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions. It also calls Jacob Zuma’s ability to lead a unity government into question. Zuma, meanwhile, is tired of the media’s constant questions, particularly their allegations of widespread corruption. His party has drafted the Protection of Information Bill, a vaguely worded document which, if passed, would allow government to define any information deemed “harmful” to the “national interest” as classified, and proposed a Media Appeals Tribunal with the power to imprison journalists for breaching the new laws. The bill makes no provision for “public interest” and a number of civil society groups have questioned its constitutionality. A government dominated by a single party placing a vaguely defined national interest above public interest will, of course, sound familiar to many China watchers, and this is possibly no coincidence. The ANC has made its admiration of the Chinese Communist Party plain and the two parties have together set up a jointly-funded program to bring all 88 members of the ANC’s National Executive Committee to China on two-week long “study tours”.
The mood in South Africa was reflected by the country’s most incisive political cartoonist Jonathan Shapiro, better known by his pen name, Zapiro. Shapiro is currently being sued by Jacob Zuma for defamation, after he penned a cartoon depicting the president – then only the leader of the ANC – raping Lady Justice in 2008. You can find more of his cartoons at the Mail & Guardian and Sunday Times as well as a short biography at South African Cartoonists and Illustrators. Zapiro’s own website is at http://www.zapiro.com.
Iain Manley
Iain studied journalism at the University of Cape Town, where communists were skinny professors who wore tweed. He arrived in China in 2007, at the end of an overland journey from London, documented at his overland travelogue. His first book, about the pirates, prostitutes and opium peddlers of old Singapore, was published last year, just before he left China, to travel back to South Africa, overland.
To get in touch, follow him on Twitter at @iainmanley
or send an email to manleyiain@gmail.com.
An important article. Your included Zapiro cartoons are just so brilliant – I love Zuma’s expression in the first!
What is remarkable to me is just how little fuss is being made about the Protection of Information Bill. Have South Africans all fallen asleep? Are they perhaps now mainly focussed on material issues? Have they studied the history of Zimbabwe? Do they understand how clamping down on the media will affect each and every one of them in the end – a few favourably, admittedly.