DEFINING MOMENTS: Voices from the field

As part of Business Day’s 40th anniversary reflections, we continue our deep-dive series into the policy pivots that reshaped South Africa — from inflation targeting and the rollout of a national HIV/AIDS programme, to landmark M&A deals and high-profile corporate collapses

JONATHAN KATZENELLENBOGEN offers a candid retrospective on media, markets and missed questions. He reflects on a time when investment faith in the ANC — bolstered by a mining-driven growth wave — helped lower unemployment and fuel optimism:

“Business Day was in its heyday during the transition to democracy and the release of Nelson Mandela from prison. It was a time of uncertainty, anxiety and promise. We said this country is going to boom, and believed it. 

We gave the ANC the benefit of the doubt, and we should have taken a step back and asked ourselves if a one-party democracy was what was best for SA. There is no growth story for SA, and the ANC is very cut off. — Jonathan Katzenellenbogen was Business Day’s economics editor in the late 1990s.

For LUKANYO MNYANDA, who steered Business Day through four of the most volatile years in recent memory, the standout chapter was the 2019 Covid-19 pandemic — a crisis not just of public health, but of editorial survival:

“The 2019 Covid-19 health pandemic was probably the most challenging period in Business Day’s history. On top of the human tragedy in which some of us lost colleagues, friends and family members, it also presented an existential crisis for Business Day too as our advertising revenue collapsed overnight.

I will forever be impressed by how the whole newsroom showed incredible courage and resilience to consistently produce top-quality coverage despite understandable concerns about their own health and anxiety brought about by the difficult financial position we found ourselves in.

I was also very proud of how we covered the mayhem and the deadly riots that followed Jacob Zuma’s jailing in 2021. We were so far ahead of the pack on that story that one of the ministers involved did not know what was happening until they were called by a reporter from Business Day.”

PETER BRUCE’S tenure as editor began in 2001 with record-breaking print runs and editorial ambition, and the newsroom brimmed with 120 journalists, daily cartoons and plans for expanded company coverage.

“The board had looked kindly on plans to introduce a third eight-page section which would separate our company coverage from investing and markets. Boy, did I get a lesson in pride coming before a fall. Around midday on September 9 2001 fundamentalist terrorists flew commercial airliners into the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington.

“We had a 28-page main body edition planned for the next day, and within half an hour, most of our advertising had been pulled. In a sense, it never came back. Two weeks later, I was instructed to immediately cut 40 jobs in the newsroom. It was excruciating, but it prepared me for the next five substantial section 189 redundancy processes I would eventually oversee as print newsrooms shrank around the world.

I had called Ken Owen, Business Day’s first editor, and asked what he would do if so instructed. He was blunt. “Slaughter them,” he said, “and when you’re done, go upstairs and tell the board.”

ALLAN FINE’S journey at Business Day began in 1985, just as Cosatu rose to prominence and SA entered a state of emergency. Then-editor Ken Owen, though conservative, recognised the significance of the labour movement — a space Fine knew intimately from his own activist roots:

“I was sent to Lusaka a week later for the first post-unbanning ANC NEC meeting. It was a remarkable experience meeting for the first time many of those who would soon be at the forefront of the negotiations over SA’s future and then, together with former prisoners and former local political and union leaders, part of the government from 1994.

Jim Jones became Business Day editor in 1990. As mentioned in his obituary that appeared on these pages in September 2023, Jim’s recipe for Business Day’s approach to the political transition was: “We need to help the ANC learn about business and we need to help business learn about how to operate in a nonracial democracy and how to relate to the ANC.”

I was leader page editor, then deputy editor, then Cape editor, all three roles including writing analysis and leaders, along with some reporting on the political negotiations of the next several years and the first eight years of democracy until I departed in 2002.

Ensuring that Business Day provided that balance of perspectives was an important part of my work. We certainly liked to think that, in doing so, Business Day was one of the most important news forums for discussion and engagement on the future of the country during the years of political transition. It was also the time when Business Day’s circulation peaked at somewhere over 40,000.”