SOUTH AFRICAN BROADCASTING CORPORATION HAS REVERTED TO APARTHEID STYLE DICTATORSHIP WITH ITS CURRENT BOSS

 This article comes from the Daily Maverick and details how dictatorship is born and creeps up on a population without them being aware of what is going on. This needs to be nipped in the bud, but the other dictator in South Africa, its president, needs also to be removed now before it is too late. South Africa's governance has reached crisis levels and the people of South Africa who have suffered the consequences of Mbeki and AIDS during his presidency have gone even further backwards since the advent of Zuma.

Enough is enough!

His Master’s Voice: Why Hlaudi Motsoeneng is democratic SA’s biggest threat

• Ranjeni Munusamy
• South Africa
• 01 Jul 2016 

Until this week, Hlaudi Motsoeneng, the holder of all power at the public broadcaster, was being written off as a megalomaniac on his own frolic at the SABC. But the ANC has now shown its hand, coming out in defence of Motsoeneng’s total onslaught. Motsoeneng is moulding his own brand of political indoctrination out of the worst models of propaganda in history and taking media freedom hostage as he does so. This is no longer a laughing matter and society should not be looking away any more. By RANJENI MUNUSAMY.

At the Topography of Terror monument in Berlin, Germany, a sign at the entrance to the museum reads: “Berlin 1933-1945 Between Propaganda and Terror”. The sign is a reminder of the central role the propaganda machinery played in Nazi Germany’s era of persecution and terror. Adolf Hitler’s chief attack dog was Joseph Goebbels, who directed the propaganda machinery to acquire total power and control the minds of an entire nation. The reign of terror would not have been possible without effective indoctrination and complete control of every aspect of communications in Germany through the Second World War.

The problems at the SABC started long before the matric-less Hlaudi Motsoeneng’s rise to power. The SABC was a key instrument of apartheid South Africa’s machinery and with its size and reach, through 19 radio stations and now four television stations, the “public” broadcaster has continued to serve as a powerful political tool. During the democratic era, the SABC has been on a constant ebb and flow with financial crises and senior management coming and going. There have been phases in the past where censorship and editorial bias were prevalent, but they pale in comparison to the Era of Hlaudi, with a wholesale takeover of editorial policy and programming.

When it comes to survival tactics, it is only President Jacob Zuma who can rival Motsoeneng. Both are able to shake off scandals, adverse court rulings and damning Public Protector reports, and are somehow strengthened by them. Perhaps their common invincibility is the secret to their alliance. 

Motsoeneng was fired from the SABC in 2007 when he was a current affairs producer at Lesedi FM. He fought his way back into the public broadcaster despite a long drawn-out labour dispute that brought to light the fact that he misled the SABC about his qualifications.

 Motsoeneng was appointed as the general manager responsible for board and stakeholder relations in the group chief executive officer’s office in February 2011, a position that opened his path to the top job. In December 2011, he was seconded to act as chief operating officer and has been an unstoppable force since then.

In February 2014, Public Protector Thuli Madonsela released a report, “When Governance and Ethics Fail”, which found that Motsoeneng was “unethical” and “dishonest” about claiming to have a matric certificate. She also found that his conduct was irregular and he was guilty of maladministration for improperly escalating people’s salaries. The remedial action prescribed by Madonsela was that the SABC board should take disciplinary action against Motsoeneng.

The Supreme Court of Appeal ruled that Madonsela’s report could not be ignored or second-guessed. The Constitutional Court judgment in the Nkandla matter removed all doubt about the standing of Public Protector reports, and even the president now has to comply with the remedial action prescribed in his case. While Zuma has agreed to pay back the money, Motsoeneng continues to dodge the rulings against him. He wriggled out of censure though a farcical SABC disciplinary hearing and was permanently appointed into the position of COO.

He has unchecked power, including over programming and news. Motsoeneng has gone from silly antics, such as ordering television news coverage of his colourful life, including a group of religious leaders praying over him and receiving a “bride” as a gift, to censoring news and suspending journalists. He has banned coverage of violent protest action and negative news about Zuma because he “deserves a certain degree of respect as president of the country”. The SABC has canned shows featuring the views of editors and analysts, and journalists at the broadcaster have become progressively constrained about what they can say and who they can interview.

Motsoeneng’s penchant for ludicrous statements and perspectives on journalism have escalated to bizarre levels in recent weeks. He told City Press recently that SABC employees were expected to “sing the song and talk the talk of the SABC”.

“If the SABC releases a statement, our employees can’t say ‘the SABC said this’; they must say ‘we are saying this or have decided on that’. They can’t report like other broadcasters when they are part of any SABC decision,” Motsoeneng told the paper. “I have been thinking maybe our employees should have uniforms so that they can understand unity,” he professed.

Speaking at a media briefing this week following the sudden resignation of acting group chief executive officer Jimi Matthews, Motsoeneng denied that his actions constituted censorship:
“I don’t even know what censorship is. What is this censorship thing? It is English so I don’t know it. There is no censorship here,” he said.

The SABC has now suspended six journalists who have expressed their concerns about the strict editorial stance of the broadcaster. At a staff meeting on Tuesday, Motsoeneng told SABC employees to comply with his rules or to leave the broadcaster. The Star reported that Motsoeneng said at the meeting:

“If you are at the SABC, there is leadership, and if the leadership says you must turn right, you must turn right. If you turn left, you must get off the bus.”

The paper quoted an employee as saying:

“He said he was going to charge people and discipline them. His tone was very harsh. He also said the three suspended journalists may survive the axe but those standing in solidarity with them may lose their jobs.”

Director of Media Monitoring Africa William Bird says many SABC staffers are worried about being victimised and the atmosphere of fear at the broadcaster is growing. He said editorial interference was increasing with journalists being told, for example, that that they were not allowed to broadcast any analysis of the spy tapes judgment against Zuma.

The skewed editorial positioning is particularly concerning during an election period as it is unashamedly intended to project the president and the ANC favourably. Until this week, the ANC could not be directly linked to Motsoeneng’s onslaught on the airwaves. It appeared that he and Communications Minister Faith Muthambi were on their own misguided mission to keep the favour of the president. But in reaction to Matthews’ resignation, ANC spokesman Zizi Kodwa said this week that the move was “opportunistic”. Kodwa was quoted by the SABC as saying that Matthews had allowed himself to be “used by those who… want to undermine the integrity of the public broadcaster”.

Matthews said in his resignation letter that there was a “corrosive atmosphere” at the SABC that had impacted negatively on his moral judgement and made him complicit in decisions he “was not proud of”.

“What is happening at the broadcaster is wrong and I can no longer be part of it,” he said. “I also wish to apologise to the many people who I’ve let down by remaining silent when my voice needed to be heard.”

Instead of being discerning about what Matthews and others have been saying about the chaos at the SABC, the ANC has opted to defend Motsoeneng’s reign of terror:

“I think clearly the intention is to add to the narrative that SABC is in disarray… he has allowed himself to be a tool to be used to attack the entire integrity of the SABC,” Kodwa said of Matthews.

Bird says the regression and assault on media freedom at the SABC has the sanction of Muthambi and the ANC. “It is astounding that the ANC has gone against its 100-year history of promoting media freedom,” Bird said.

A report by Media Monitoring Africa on media coverage of the 2016 local government elections shows that the ANC already enjoys the bulk of the voice, much higher than it did during the 2014 election campaign. The ANC now has 57% of the total media coverage compared to 38% in 2014. In comparison, the Democratic Alliance’s coverage dropped from 25% in 2014 to 16% now. The Economic Freedom Fighters’ coverage dropped from 13% to 11%. Bird said these percentages were largely affected by the SABC’s coverage patterns.

South African society has so far been largely tolerant of Motsoeneng’s antics and propaganda mission. In the context of a cycle of scandal and abuse of state institutions, the decay of the SABC is not out of the ordinary.

But through the power and resources of the public broadcaster, Motsoeneng has been allowed to infiltrate the homes and minds of millions of people around the country. He is able to do much more damage to a free and democratic society than any other state institution can by controlling access to information and people’s perspectives. Motsoeneng’s evasion of court rulings and legal procedures adds to the culture of impunity in our country. His assault on media freedom is an assault on the Constitution and the fundamentals of our democracy.

On Friday morning, the South African media fraternity begins a campaign to stand up to South Africa’s answer to Joseph Goebbels. Media freedom pickets will be held at the SABC headquarters in Auckland Park, Johannesburg and the broadcaster’s offices in Sea Point, Cape Town. The pickets are acts of solidarity with journalists forced to comply with Motsoeneng’s ridiculous editorial policies and those who have been suspended for speaking out against them. These pickets will hopefully awaken society to the clear and present danger of accepting indoctrination in an era when democratic institutions are under siege and those in power seek to hide their scandals and leadership failures.

Motsoeneng is as conceited as he is dangerous. Left unchecked, it is not just the SABC that he will destroy. It should not be forgotten that Goebbels succeeded Hitler as Chancellor of Germany, if only for a day.

Motsoeneng’s ambitions and political backers have brought him this far. Left unchecked, the SABC is unlikely to be the end of the road for the invincible Mr Motsoeneng. After successfully penetrating our living rooms, our workspaces and our minds, the sky is the limit in terms of what Motsoeneng will do next. The onus is upon us, South Africans, to decide if we will let him. DM

Photo: Hlaudi Motsoeneng with his spirit guide, Joseph Goebbels.

From CounterPunch - 4 March 2016

Austerity Gathers Pace in Schizophrenic South Africa

by Patrick Bond

 

A wedge is being quickly driven through Pretoria’s political elite, splitting even those who operated tightly together in the murky 1980s Durban spy scene during the fight against apartheid. Amongst the victims are vast numbers of poor people beginning to bear the brunt of the diverse shakeouts now underway, in a confrontation between the country’s two most powerful 21^st century politicians: President Jacob Zuma and his predecessor Thabo Mbeki. That battle began more than a decade ago, when Mbeki fired Zuma as Deputy President in 2005 after a corruption conviction against a long-time Zuma associate.

The revival of the duel comes at a very tense time here, what with student, worker and community protests having intensified last month after the December-January summer break. Repeated currency crashes have left a 30% decline in value over the past year, so the country’s financiers and upper-middle class commentariat are nearly universally applauding Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan for maintaining low-grade austerity. The economic threat to this faction is a ‘junk’ label by international credit rating agencies, one which appears imminent and will lead to faster capital flight.

But Gordhan was himself under growing political threat, becoming visibly furious with Zuma’s top police and tax authorities last week, as his parliamentary Budget Speech preparations were interrupted by allegations he once set up a ‘rogue unit’ to spy on Zuma, during the time Gordhan ran the tax agency. The ruling party appears split down the middle with durable loyalty to Zuma, on the one hand, balanced against fear that Gordhan’s misfortunes will reverberate chaotically across the sickly economy on the other.

To make matters even muddier, Zuma – formerly head of the African National Congress (ANC) spy unit during the liberation struggle when Gordhan was amongst his most loyal cohort working from Durban – was defended in court this week against allegations against his allied spies within state security. In April 2009, just before being elected president, as Zuma was preparing to be charged for 783 counts of corruption, his spooks foiled the prosecution by releasing transcripts of tapped phone calls between Mbeki’s main crime investigator, Leonard McCarthy, and Bulelani Ngcuka, who was a former prosecutor and the husband of Mbeki’s then Deputy President.

Though it is unclear how much Mbeki knew and endorsed, the two apparently arranged the timing of earlier attacks on Zuma to coincide with Mbeki’s ambition to serve a third term as ANC leader in late 2007. Mbeki’s failure to win support for that bid (as Zuma replaced him in a decisive election) led, by September 2008, to Mbeki’s sacking as state president nine months before his term was due to end. The firing was done in a fit of collective rage by the ANC National Executive just after a Durban judge affirmed that Zuma was being victimised in a political conspiracy.

The main conspirator, McCarthy, was – without any apparent due diligence investigation at the time – quickly moved from Pretoria to Washington in 2008, to become World Bank Vice President: Integrity (sic), with the assistance of Mbeki ally, Finance Minister Trevor Manuel. As McCarthy put it, he needed a makeover to appear ‘squeaky clean.’ He wasn’t, a fact that we are continually reminded of, while the World Bank continues to employ McCarthy on sensitive investigations.

Meanwhile back in South Africa, corruption was spreading like wildfire, and in one futile effort to douse an obvious source, illegal cigarette smuggling, local tax authorities ran foul of Zuma’s spies as well as his son Edward in 2011. Those investigations, in turn, apparently generated the recent attack on Gordhan, who before becoming finance minister initially in 2009, was the chief tax commissioner.

The unprecedented contagion of what Zuma last week called ‘gossip and rumour’ around his inner circle threatens the internal stability of the Pretoria regime. The loyalty of many key individuals is being tested. Indeed the ANC’s schizophrenia was amplified two weeks prior to Gordhan’s Budget Speech when, just before his State of the Nation Address on February 11, Zuma himself finally agreed to repay some of the $16 million in state subsidies that were spent on upgrading his rural palace, Nkandla. This about-turn occurred after Zuma compelled ANC parliamentarians to support him when he had refused to ‘pay back the money!’, as opposition politicians long demanded.

While society tried to steady its political feet on this SA Titanic, the economic ship also continued to list dangerously, what with world financial markets roiling the currency and ever-worsening GDP statistics fueling capital flight. In spite of bending over backwards to meet financial markets’ demands for a lower budget deficit (he promised it will be just 2.4% of GDP by 2018, down from 3.8%), Gordhan was pummeled by an immediate 3.2% currency collapse in the minutes after he spoke to parliament.

Yet he had done what the financiers demanded: increased the austerity begun a year earlier by the prior finance minister Nhlanhla Nene, who was fired in a farcical musical chairs operation in December that led to Gordhan’s return. Though Gordhan was once a leftist, his new budget provides just a 3.5% nominal increase to foster care providers (who play such a vital role given the catastrophic AIDS orphan rate) and a 6.1% rise for mothers who are Child Support Grant recipients.

These poor families face double-digit inflation this year thanks to food, electricity and transport hikes. So Gordhan’s ‘real’ – after-inflation – cuts to welfare grants of several percent lower the incomes of 16.5 million recipients (out of the country’s 55 million population). They will struggle to find more holes in their frayed belts to tighten them up, given that 63% of South Africans – mostly women – already live below the poverty line.

Worse is to come, what with South Africa’s foreign debt having doubled to $145 billion since 2009, with debt/GDP levels at mid-1980s levels. As a result of that worsening vulnerability, the men who really yank Gordhan’s chain work for Standard&Poors, Fitch and Moodys credit rating agencies, and financiers such as New York-based Goldman Sachs. The latter bank helped raid the South African currency on January 11, sending it down 9% to R17.99/$ in just 13 minutes of flash-crash speculation, shortly after telling its traders that globally, the rand’s decline is the bank’s second most aggressive bet for 2016 (after the dollar’s rise).

The dire financial situation is far more complicated than mere ill-will, for it is useful to recall that back in 2009, when IMF managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn advocated deficit spending to save world capitalism from implosion, Moody’s actually upgraded Gordhan after his soaring 7.3% deficit/GDP rise that year. The agency actually raised South Africa’s credit rating from BBB+ to A-. (With similar wild abandon, Moody’s also rated Lehman Brothers as ‘investment grade’ just days before it crashed.)

Whimsical though they are, these agencies have at least put pressure on Gordhan to throw cold water on Zuma’s $100 billion nuclear energy dreams, notwithstanding intense pressure to buy reactors from Moscow and Beijing. And to Gordhan’s credit, he dodged that round of Russian Roulette by kicking the bullet over to Energy Minister Tina Joemat-Pettersson, to do “preparatory work for investment in nuclear power.”

More objectionably, Gordhan’s budget included a substantial $40 million increase in funds for the notorious Public Order Policing (POP) unit – the unpunished Marikana Massacre hit-men who joked about defective muti while planting weapons on their victims – instead of defunding the POP and replacing it with skilled peace-broking units. But on the other hand, Gordhan slashed $500 million in overall spending on defence, public order and safety services from the 2018 spending projections made by his predecessor.

But it was when Gordhan bragged of the state’s most active spending that leaders of my residential community grew furious. After living on Durban’s seaside Bluff neighbourhood for many years, the highlight of Budget Day for me was reviewing the carnage with the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance in a long strategy session two hours after Gordhan finished speaking. In the basement of a shabby community hall that Gordhan himself once frequented when he was a Durban activist, as rusty fans blew back the city’s

 humid air at us, two dozen hardened activists of all races, classes, genders and ages mulled over his generosity towards the parastatal corporation Transnet and other behemoths within the local port-petrochemical complex – the activists’ sworn enemies.

Gordhan would not be the first politician accused of pandering to the construction mafia by turning a blind eye to repeated collusion and overpricing here in Durban. The current outrage is Transnet’s racist rerouting of the oft-exploding pipeline that doubles petrol-pumping capacity to Johannesburg from the Engen and Shell/BP plants at Africa’s largest refining complex, sandwiching the Indian suburb of Merebank, whose Settlers Primary School has an asthma rate that was not long ago measured at 52%, the world’s highest. Last month’s cost estimate revision on what Transnet originally priced at around $400 million, is now nearly $2 billion.

Gordhan announced another $19 billion in state spending on “inter-modal transport and logistics networks [to] improve South Africa’s competitiveness,” but vast shares of those spoils are going to
Zuma’s White Elephant breeding project: useless fossil-centric infrastructure.

Here in South Durban, we worry that the Baltic Dry Index – which measures shipping capacity – is now at its lowest in history (around 300 after a 2008 peak of 12 000). And with demand having crashed, fossil fuel prices have also hit the floor, casting a dark spell over Gordhan’s brag that “work has begun on a new gas terminal and oil and ship repair facilities at Durban.”

Ironically perhaps, this sentence came just three lines after Gordhan praised the Paris UN Summit’s (highly dubious) commitment to fighting climate change. He continued, “We need to accelerate infrastructure investment in the period ahead. So we must broaden the range and scope of our co-funding partnerships with private sector investors.”

Worst of all, in terms of violating both climate and economic commonsense, Gordhan bragged about Transnet’s financing of the top priority Presidential Infrastructure Coordinating Commission project: the rail-to-ship transfer of 18 billion tonnes of coal in coming decades, dragged over mountains new heavy-duty railroads. That Waterburg-Richards Bay rail line – also costing upwards of $20 billion – may have looked profitable in 2008 with coal at $170/tonne, but now the price is $50/tonne. Yet the project trundles on, fertilising the northern areas of the country – including an area not far from Nkandla – with white elephant manure.

Further south in Durban, Toyota boss Johan van Zyl (whose plant – Africa’s largest – is adjacent to the old airport site) complained of frustrating delays in getting $7 billion Dig Out Port up and running back in 2012: “If return on investment is the line of thinking we may never see the infrastructure.” Similarly, amidst rumours of a two-year Dig Out Port delay last December, Durban Chamber of Commerce and Industry president Zeph Ndlovu insisted on adding this biggest single elephant to the herd: “We have to press ahead, and if we are to unseat our competitors up north, we can’t win this battle if we pull back every now and then and look at accounting principles.”

Whether Gordhan goes ahead with reducing the state payroll by tens of thousands of public servants as he promised the ratings agencies, or continues his nudge-nudge-wink-wink towards corporations’ $20 billion in annual Illicit Financial Flows, it’s in his coddling of accounting-challenged Durban cronies and the crack-down on welfare grant recipients that Gordhan has most decisively intervened in South Africa’s world-leading class struggle.

And this tearing of the social fabric by one faction of the ruling party, backed by the country’s core bourgeois interests and petit-bourgeois cheerleaders, makes the overall split between Gordhan’s technocrats and Zuma’s populists all the less appealing. Some might be tempted to hope that both factions succeed – in ripping each other’s power bases to shreds.

Patrick Bond has a joint appointment in political economy at the Wits University School of Governance in Johannesburg, alongside directing the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society in Durban. His latest book is BRICS: An Anti-Capitalist Critique (co-edited with Ana Garcia), published by Pluto (London), Haymarket (Chicago), Jacana (Joburg) and Aakar (Delhi).

MBEKI'S REPUTATION IS NOT IN TATTERS BECAUSE HE WAS ALOOF

Op-Ed: Mbeki's reputation is not in tatters because he was aloof

• Nathan Geffen
• from Daily Maverick
• South Africa
• 01 Feb 2016 10:59 (South Africa)

It is because his policies caused hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths. By Nathan Geffen for GROUNDUP.

First published by GroundUp.

Four articles so far. More than 7,000 words. Yet in Thabo Mbeki's attempt to salvage his legacy, not once has our former president mentioned HIV. (Read articles one, two, three and four.)

In Monday's missive, which is even less penetrable than usual, Mbeki appears to defend himself from the charge of being aloof. He is upset that this accusation contributed to his defeat by Jacob Zuma at Polokowane in 2007.

But leaders are not looked upon unkindly by history solely for a subjective personality trait such as aloofness. Mbeki's reputation doesn't rise or fall on whether he was aloof, too intellectual or even authoritarian in his personal relationships. It is deservedly and unalterably shattered for a much clearer reason: he pursued policies that resulted in hundreds of thousands of people dying, most of whom might otherwise have still been alive today.

On 10 December 1998, a handful of people held a protest on the steps of St George's Cathedral. They had two main demands for government: (1) Make a plan to introduce an antiretroviral called AZT for pregnant women with HIV. (2) Develop “a comprehensive and affordable treatment plan for all people living with HIV/AIDS.”

That was the modest launch of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC). It took nearly four more years, two court orders and many large demonstrations before the state began reluctantly rolling out a countrywide mother-to-child transmission programme in 2002. It would take until March 2004 before antiretroviral treatment became available as a matter of policy in the public health system. And then only after more protests, the intervention of Nelson Mandela, a civil disobedience campaign and legal threats. By contrast, Botswana began its treatment programme in January 2002.

Even after the antiretroviral treatment rollout began, Mbeki's Minister of Health undermined it. She and the Medical Research Council under Anthony Mbewu gave and received support, both material and moral, to and from the charlatan Matthias Rath.
Rath ran double page newspaper advertisements across the country dissuading people from taking antiretrovirals. Instead, he encouraged them to take his vitamin products. He ran an unauthorised clinical trial, an extremely serious crime for which he can be tried if he ever returns to South Africa, under the nose of the Minister. His colleagues presented “results” of this trial at a meeting with the minister and the provincial MECs for Health (p. 56). She defended him publicly.

Meanwhile people died on Rath's clinical trial. They too might be alive today had they sought treatment in the public health system. It took two court cases by the TAC to run this murderous quack out of the country.

There was much else: co-option by the Department of Health of The National Association of People Living with HIV and AIDS (NAPWA), a major organisation representing people with HIV, support of several other charlatans – at least one of whom was even given an opportunity to present to a parliamentary committee (p. 87) to the applauds of the ANC members present. And let's not forget Virodene and Mbeki's purge of the Medicines Control Council because its chair dared to call him out (ch. 8).

Nearly two decades later that once internationally renowned institution has still not recovered.

Mbeki disputed there were many AIDS deaths. He was supported by Rian Malan. This likely earned Malan a favourable mention in Mbeki's 2004 State of the Nation Address.
Two studies, conducted independently of each other, have estimated that the delayed treatment rollout caused well over 300,000 avoidable deaths. These estimates are conservative. Without the robust response by civil society to Mbeki that ultimately resulted in the change in government policy, many more would have died.

You could argue that Mbeki made a mistake, that he got it unintentionally wrong, that there was no malice in his AIDS denialism. But Mbeki chose to ignore the country's scientists and doctors. These included Malegapuru Makgoba, who headed the Medical Research Council (before being replaced by Mbewu), Kgosi Letlape who headed the South African Medical Association, respected researchers Quarraisha and Salim Abdool Karim and many others.

Mbeki also ignored ordinary people with HIV like Christopher Moraka. In 2000 Moraka, dying of AIDS-related illnesses, appeared before Parliament and pleaded for pharmaceutical companies to drop the prices of AIDS medicines. He died long before the companies or anyone in cabinet listened. Mbeki, his Miniser of Health, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, and his Minister of Trade and Industry, Alec Erwin, barely lifted a finger to help bring down drug prices. That was left to TAC and other civil society organisations.

Instead Mbeki hosted his absurd AIDS advisory panel, half of whose members were AIDS denialists. He was photographed – smiling, not aloof – with an outspoken, now dead of AIDS, denialist. He questioned whether a virus can cause a syndrome, and continuously cast aspersions on proven antiretroviral treatments.

Whether or not Mbeki was aloof is irrelevant. What matters is that he caused enormous suffering and death. He should consider himself fortunate to have escaped prosecution. Instead of indulging in impenetrable revisionism, he should maybe consider penance by living the rest of his life quietly, pursuing good deeds. Perhaps he, as well as his chief apologist Frank Chikane, could start by washing the feet of the surviving members of Christopher Moraka's family. DM

Geffen is GroundUp's editor. Views expressed are not necessarily shared by GroundUp's staff.
Photo: Funeral of AIDS treatment activist Christopher Moraka on 8 May 2000. Source: Treatment Action Campaign.

• Nathan Geffen
• South Africa