Courtroom drama overshadows local government issues
While televised commissions and courtrooms expose state decay, their endless broadcasts create a dangerous blind spot. Media networks remain obsessively fixated on the theatrical legal showdowns of the Madlanga commission and the Senzo Meyiwa trial. Meanwhile, the real-time structural transformation of the country goes completely untelevised.
We are mere months away from the critical local government elections, yet television screens offer no respite from courtroom fatigue to show voters what is actually working and failing on the ground.
Rather than merely lamenting this lack of substance, we must demand a structural solution from our broadcasters, particularly the public broadcaster, which carries a strict civic mandate.
Networks should implement dedicated, daily metropolitan oversight slots. For every hour spent broadcasting a courtroom pool feed, a mandatory portion of airtime should be allocated to hard-hitting field reporting on municipal infrastructure.
This programming must enforce a balanced “metro audit” format. On one hand, it must expose catastrophic infrastructure failures, such as Johannesburg’s buckling bridges or the recent municipal building fire in Nelson Mandela Bay that gutted vital data spaces. On the other hand, it must equally showcase proven blueprints of functional excellence, such as the consecutive clean audits locked in by the City of Cape Town.
Broadcasters claim programming is based on public interest, but shared courtroom feeds are chosen simply because they are cheap and drive ratings. Implementing a mandatory, balanced municipal tracker slot will force networks to invest resources back into investigative field journalism. South Africans do not need more courtroom soap opera; they need actionable, balanced data on local governance before they head to the ballot box.
Nathan Motjuwadi
Via email
Race-based policies fuel SA’s struggle with Stem skills
Michael Kahn’s article refers (“New industrial strategy — capability, wherefore art thou?”, June 18).
The reason we lack human capital in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Stem)-related education, qualifications and skills is that we have prevented those who are most capable (especially minority groups) from participating in the economy, specifically through BEE, employment equity and affirmative action policies.
To industrialise, we cannot afford to have our most educated and skilled white youngsters emigrating; it is as simple as that. How much of all the cost of private education (the only effective education in South Africa) and of qualifying Stem graduates is wasted when these youngsters are prevented from entering the job market due to racial legislation?
The UK, Canada, Australia and the US, in particular, are benefiting by taking much of our finest young talent due to racial prejudice, at great cost to the South African economy. We need to fix this before trying to look at industrialising.
Ian Ferguson
Via Business Day online
Ebola crisis exposes failures of leadership and preparedness
The Ebola epidemic now tearing through the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Uganda is routinely described in the press as a natural disaster (‘Only a matter of time’ for Ebola in SA if DRC outbreak not contained: Abdool Karim”, June 18). This is a mystification. “Natural disaster,” like the older phrase “act of God”, is a formula for resignation, presenting as fate what is in fact the outcome of decisions, structures and interests that can be identified and held to account.
The emergence of a pathogen from the animal world is in the first instance a natural event. But modern science has transformed humanity’s relationship to such events. Tools exist to detect an outbreak in its first days, trace and isolate its spread, and treat the infected. Whether a zoonotic spillover becomes a contained cluster or a regional catastrophe is therefore not a question of nature but of society.
A 2022 study published in Nature projects that climate-driven and land-use-driven shifts in animal ranges will generate thousands of new opportunities for cross-species viral transmission in the coming decades, concentrated in Asia and Africa.
The same technological advances that have made the world more dangerous have also given humanity the means to master these dangers. It is in this precise sense that the deepening Ebola epidemic constitutes social murder. The mass death unfolding today in Central Africa is the product of crimes of both commission and omission, carried out by a ruling class that possessed every capacity to prevent it and chose to dismantle the defences that stood in its way.
The Bundibugyo strain now circulating has no approved vaccine and no specific treatment, and in the two previous outbreaks it killed 30%-50% of those infected. World Health Organisation officials concede that even a candidate vaccine remains six to nine months away.
John P Naidu
Via email
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