Yonela Diko is the ANC’s spokesperson in the Western Cape and a weekly columnist for the Daily Maverick.
On inspection, many of his columns appear to have large sections lifted wholesale from various online sources, without reference, attribution, hyperlinks to the relevant work or, most importantly, quotation marks. On the evidence, then, he would seem a serial plagiarist. This is an analysis of the problem.
To make the case, this analysis will focus primarily on four columns, each of which have borrowed at great length from a single source, without crediting them, often word-for-word. Examples, however, are not limited to these four case studies, there are many others, which will be briefly set out towards the end.
Case study 1
Column: Is the Democratic Alliance facing extinction?, published on June 4.
Unaccredited work: 4 lessons from extinct political parties, published on October 15 2013
The column on the left represents Yonela Diko’s original text, the column on the right the work from which he lifted his ideas. The bolded sentences are the ones that overlap, often entirely and sometimes almost entirely.
When alerted to the problem on Twitter, the Daily Maverick responded by saying: "Embarrassingly, it was indeed our mistake — things went wrong the subediting process. Fixed now. We apologise to our readers and Mr Diko."
The response, however, seems limited to this particular article (they did not address the other three) and the edits do little to address the problem.
If you click through to the article now, you will see the following:
"History is littered with deceased political parties and most of them follow the same pattern. In the US, for example, Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist Party (1790s to 1816) eventually died out after developing a reputation as an elitist cadre that cared more about the interests of its New England base than the national good. (Keith Wagstaff 2013)."
All that is included is the bracketed reference at the end of only that paragraph. At a stretch, that might excuse the very first instance, but it does nothing to address the paragraphs that follow. Importantly, there are no quotation marks. Quotation marks are, of course, essential, because they indicate the wording is not an author’s own, but taken from elsewhere.
So, even after the Daily Maverick’s rather odd intervention (more about that later), the following, for example, stands unedited in Diko’s text without quotation marks:
The debate over slavery, however, ripped the party apart, with antislavery Whigs heading over to Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party and "cotton Whigs" defecting to the Democratic Party.
That, however, is not Diko’s work. Word-for-word, it is the work of Keith Wagstaff, and was first written in 2013. Without quotation marks, Diko has attempted to present it as his own. And the attribution inserted by the Daily Maverick, the paragraph before, does nothing to address that.
Other wholesale copied-and-pasted lines from Wagstaff, which still stand without quotation marks in Diko’s piece, include the following:
• In the end, Roosevelt’s new party split votes with the Republicans, giving Democratic candidate Woodrow Wilson the victory.
• The Bull Moose Party died because of the liberal positions it co-opted from the left. But its demise more generally shows that any prominent Democrat or Republican starting a new party runs the risk of handing an election to the other side.
Case study 2
Column: Minimum Wage: The historical battle between pragmatists and anarchists, published on May 7.
Unaccredited work: The brief origins of May Day, industrial workers of the world, published in 1993.
Strangely, the Daily Maverick, in its response, did not address any of the issues that define case studies 2, 3 and 4. So, as things stand, the problems above remain as is on the Daily Maverick website.
Again, these are not issues addressed, as the Daily Maverick attempted to do with case study 1, by merely inserting a reference in brackets after the initial paragraph. These represent the wholesale lifting of entire sentences from the work of another person: something that can only be properly remedied by the insertion of quotation marks. The long and the short of it is that no quotation marks around word-for-word copy from someone else equals intellectual theft.
Take the second example, by way of illustration (that starts "As early as the 1860s…") or the third ("At first…") or the fourth ("Despite the misgivings…"). In all these cases, Diko has totally and absolutely cut and pasted the work of another person, in this case Eric Chase, and presented them as his own, because they do not have the requisite quotation marks. The appropriation is blatant, absolute and unquestionable.
Case study 3
Column: Makhosi Khoza: The rise of the individual over the party? published on August 20 2017.
Unaccredited work: The rise and fall of the political party, published on October 23 2006
Despite being alerted to the problem, the Daily Maverick has not addressed any of the problems in this piece. Again, they are profound, and again, they can only be solved or addressed with the insertion of quotation marks as whole sentences appear have been lifted without any attribution.
Significantly, Diko appears to have quite devious in this particular example, weaving his unattributed sentiments throughout the piece and not necessarily in the order in which they appeared in the New Statesman.
Case study 4
Column: Kikwete and Mbeki must not be revisionists on Libya, published on August 27 2017
Unaccredited work: The African Union and the Libya conflict of 2011, published on December 19 2012
Unaccredited Work: The African Union (AU), the Libya Crisis and the notion of ‘African solutions to African problems’, published on October 3 2011
As with the previous case studies, Diko appears to have lifted two quotes, wholesale, from the work of two other individuals, without indicating that they were not his own by using quotation marks. There are no other attempts at referencing the relevant paragraphs and the Daily Maverick, despite its public apology, has not made any attempt to amend them.
Other Examples
As stated above, these are merely some of the most egregious. There are many, many other examples. Diko’s work on the Daily Maverick is rife with this sort of unattributed appropriation.
By way of example, this article — Smaller governments work better? It hasn’t worked out that way, published on February 17, contains the following two sentences:
• Clinton’s lean and mean reduction of government programme[s] promised to save the federal government about $108bn: $40.4bn from a "smaller bureaucracy", $36.4bn from programme changes and $22.5bn from streamlining contracting processes.
• In a September 1996 pamphlet, Al Gore, former US president Bill Clinton’s vice-president, wrote that the federal government had reduced its workforce by nearly 24,000 as of January 1996, and that 13 of the 14 departments had reduced the size of their workforce.
These are both clearly lifted from the Wikipedia entry, National Partnership for Reinventing Government, which contains the following text:
• NPR promised to save the federal government about $108bn: $40.4bn from a "smaller bureaucracy", $36.4bn from programme changes and $22.5bn from streamlining contracting processes.
• In a September 1996 pamphlet, Gore wrote that the federal government had reduced its workforce by nearly 24,000 as of January 1996, and that 13 of the 14 departments had reduced the size of their workforce
Diko’s piece also contains this paragraph:
• Economists charge that big government interferes with the mechanisms of free enterprise. Small government, on the other hand, is generally believed to lead to a more efficient and flexible system. "Getting government off our backs" or "getting government out of the way" are cries to return to the low-tax, no-regulation beliefs of the American Revolutionary period.
The article, Big government vs small government, contains the following:
• Small government, on the other hand, is generally believed to lead to a more efficient and flexible system. "Getting government off our backs" or "getting government out of the way" are cries to return to the low-tax, no-regulation beliefs of the American Revolutionary period. The size of government envisioned by the country’s founders sought to cast off tyranny and empower small businessmen and entrepreneurs.
And Diko’s article also contains the following:
• In 1981, the year President Reagan took office, the federal government spent $678bn; in 2006, it spent $2,655bn. Adjust that 292% increase for inflation, and the federal government is still spending 84% more than it did when Reagan became president — in a country whose population has grown by only 30%.
The article, The trouble with limited government, contains the following:
• In 1981, the year of that speech, the federal government spent $678bn; in 2006, it spent $2,655bn. Adjust that 292% increase for inflation, and the federal government is still spending 84% more than it did when Reagan became president — in a country whose population has grown by only 30%.
There is some attempt at referencing in this column but none of it deals with the direct lifting, wholesale, of the writing of other authors without quotation marks, and most of it precedes the specific sentence or paragraph in question, so no reader would associate the reference with the statement, least of all deduce it was constructed using Diko’s own words.
Space does not allow for other examples. They are plentiful.
It is difficult to understand the Daily Maverick’s response, which was drawn from an earlier tweet by Daily Maverick editor Branko Brkic, a considered and careful editor who cares a great deal about integrity and the Daily Maverick’s reputation. There are three possible explanations:
• Yonela Diko sent through carefully referenced copy, with citations, hyperlinks and most importantly, quotation marks around key bits of text, copied from elsewhere. The Daily Maverick subeditors, for reasons that defy explanation, then removed all of them, including the quotation marks, effectively sabotaging Diko’s columns.
If this is true, the Daily Maverick subeditors have done this to a huge number of his columns and, presumably, to a great many other columnists too, and it constitutes a huge and fundamental failure of standards at the online publication. Indeed, something of a subediting crisis.
• Having been made aware of the problem and the scale of it, and given that Diko is a prominent ANC representative, the Daily Maverick panicked, inserted one, inadequate reference into the first column cited as problematic, ignored the rest, took the blame and hoped the problem would go away. In this way, it hoped to avoid a possible confrontation with Diko or the ANC.
If this is true, it is worrying indeed. The political repercussions that may result from the problems inherent in Diko’s writings should not stand in the way of the principle.
• Diko failed fundamentally to properly attribute the large sections of his work lifted from other sources, across multiple columns, in an attempt to present ideas to the public that were not his own, as born of his own insight and analysis.
In doing so, the Daily Maverick failed to properly vet his columns – something that is perhaps understandable once or even twice — on multiple occasions, resulting in serial plagiarism. If this true, it is a profound indictment of Diko and his column should be terminated.
The Daily Maverick’s response to all this evidence, to date, is both deeply disturbing and problematic. Judging by its editing of the first column, it does not understand the problem — that the lack of quotation marks is the core concern. Indeed, it has apologised to Diko himself, something that is also difficult to understand, given that it has not corrected the core problem, thereby implicitly acknowledging whatever references it omitted were inadequate from the get-go.
If it is guilty of all the devious subediting necessary to achieve this sort of grand appropriation, that apology makes sense, but it seems implausible, as it was not even aware of the all the problems at the time of its apology and it has not rectified the vast majority of them.
Diko himself tweeted, somewhat flippantly given the seriousness of the problem, that the Daily Maverick "must stop removing my citations".
But that does kind of give the game away, because the problem has nothing to do with citations. It has to do with the absence of quotation marks and the presentation of other people’s writing and insights, as Diko’s own.
• Van Onselen is the head of politics and governance at the South African Institute of Race Relations
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