[Well, who would have thought we’d see the day when I agree with COSATU! Or, stranger still, when COSATU would agree with what some whites have been saying for a long time. FREE SPEECH ain’t so free in S.Africa. I’m telling you… Apartheid is starting to look rather ATTRACTIVE hey? Jan]

The Congress of SA Trade Unions (Cosatu) has now thrown its not inconsiderable weight against the SABC as the latest fracas about the broadcaster’s role seems to gather steam.

Addressing the inaugural national conference of the Creative Workers’ Union of South Africa (Cwusa) on Saturday, Cosatu secretary-general Zwelinzima Vavi said: “The SABC is showing clear signs of returning to its previous role as a broadcaster for the state, not the public.

“Increasingly our government and the SABC talk about controlling and limiting what the public broadcaster can or should convey to our people.”

Vavi said it had become clear that one of the biggest threats facing the nation was “the unwillingness of the state to accept criticism and support independent culture.”

Vavi made the remarks at the Johannesburg metropolitan centre in Braamfontein a day after it was announced that Jacques Pauw, an award-winning, veteran investigative journalist, had resigned from the SABC.

Pauw, who headed up the SABC’s well-known Special Assignment team, said he had quit because he had lost confidence in the organisation’s leadership. He cited the SABC’s withdrawal from the SA National Editors’ Forum (Sanef) as the last straw.

Several internal “editors” at the SABC, who did not want to be named, have told Weekend Argus they had raised their concern “in no uncertain terms” with Dali Mpofu, SABC group chief executive officer and also its editor-in-chief, over his decision to withdraw from Sanef.

“The decision may have been correct or incorrect. But what we wanted to know from Mpofu was why he had consulted his board on the issue – but not us,” said one of the editors.

The brouhaha has followed in the wake of Mpofu’s letter to Jovial Rantao, Sanef chairperson and also editor of The Sunday Independent, in which Mpofu charged that the media had behaved shamefully in the way they handled their reporting of the theft conviction and alleged propensity for alcoholic beverages of Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, the minister of health.

Mpofu’s letter to Rantao was revealed (by Mpofu) on the same day that President Thabo Mbeki wrote in his weekly letter to the nation that anyone who had questioned Tshabalala-Msimang’s behaviour had shown a singular lack of respect and ubuntu, and those who had asked whether the minister had “jumped the queue” in getting a donor liver for her March transplant had obviously wished death on her.

Pauw said: “I resigned as a matter of principle. It is clear that the SABC has deteriorated into nothing more than a state broadcaster.”

In his address on Saturday, Vavi also lambasted all those who fail to understand that the struggle songs of the people “do not have a sell-by date”.

“When we sing umshini wami (“bring me my machine gun”, the trademark ditty of Jacob Zuma, the deputy president of the ANC)”, said Vavi on Saturday, “we express our memories of our past struggles.

“It gives those of us, who still have a reason to struggle, an inspiration to struggle on.

“Perhaps others have arrived in the Promised Land. But the working class and poor have yet to make it there.”

Mosiuoa Lekota, minister of defence and ANC national chairperson, said recently on TV that anyone who continued to sing umshini wami 13 years after the armed struggle ended and the country was democratically ruled was clearly “not right in the head”.

Lekota’s comments unleashed a barrage of demands for retraction and apology from the SA Communist Party, Cosatu, the ANC Youth League and the Young Communist League.

“We will continue to sing the songs that associate us with our past,” Vavi said, “both because we remember our joys and victories, but also because they remind us of the sacrifices and the pain we went through. Who says you only sing to express the present?”

It had been intended that Zuma would be the other speaker on Saturday.

But Mabutho “Kid” Sithole, the acting president of Cwusa, who was also the master of ceremonies at Vavi’s wedding last month, said that Zuma had promised instead to address delegates on Sunday.

Sithole explained that Zuma had to attend Saturday’s ANC national executive committee meeting, “because it is the last meeting before the big ANC conference in Polokwane at the end of the year – and they really need to tie everything down now.”

At the time of Lekota’s comments, he refused to apologise or say anything at all.

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