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City Press editor-in-chief Ferial Haffajee bids farewell to the team and our readers
I leave City Press with a great gift from you. That is the gift of being absolutely clear in my love for my country, but being equally clear that our political and corporate leadership are not always so loveable.
But they do not define who we are.
The ability to make the distinction comes from City Press readers from whom I’ve learnt to define both myself and us. It is a gift ingrained in the stewardship you have allowed me in the seven years I’ve been editor.
City Press readers are firmly the readers of the freedom times: unlike other newspapers I read daily, your letters and text messages and comments online reveal none of the hankering for the blighted past I still see too often on some of those pages.
I like (y)our aspiration expressed in the ways that anything about how to make and use money is always well read. I love how protective you are of freedom and how impatient you are with cant.
There’s a trend I came across years ago in research into City Press. Our readers abhor corruption, from the local level to the grand corruption expressed in the scandals of our time, such as Nkandla and the arms deal.
This currency in South African public life is revealing itself again and again through sets of research.
If you look deep into multiple surveys, you will see that corruption has crept up alongside jobs and crimes as a key concern for South Africans.
Thus, the ANC leadership may be wrong when it says insouciantly that on the campaign trail nobody asks about Nkandla.
This antipathy to corruption will stand us in good stead as we enter the period of democratic-era high looting.
In my time here, it is clear that there is looting of the public purse and an eye trained so hard on the fast buck that the path of development is being imperiled.
Too much money is being squandered; if you tally it up, it comes to billions. The thing that has got me into the most trouble in the past few years is the view that the apartheid state also exhibited looting and the view that we ignore that historical fact. Duh! Of course it did.
Apartheid was fundamentally and intrinsically corrupt. I thought we were creating something different. And better. That worked for more people. It is a rationale I find odd – that it happened under apartheid, so why complain now?
As editor, you can’t say this too often, but now I can. We are not in the finest phase of leadership of this beautiful land.
If you think that we started with the grandeur of Nelson Mandela, our leadership has been devolutionary, whereas I had thought it would be evolutionary.
Generations can build on what has gone before. Or they can break it. As a journalist with a bird’s eye view, it feels to me like we are drifting and listless, torn hither and thither by a confused state led by a leader now with his eye on a retirement nest egg. This is not good.
We should have an eye on one set of numbers alone, and that is joblessness. Clear everything that stands in the way of absorbing our 2 million to 3 million young unemployed people and watch how things fall into place.
Great nations choose a few achievable things and do them. At my last count, we had about five economic policies. To get our millions of young people into jobs, they must be well educated.
But they can’t be because our largest teacher trade union has become a mafia, holding back important progress steps such as testing and performance measurement.
Their members (although they deny this) also do a healthy moonlight trade in selling jobs for, among other things, cash and cows. A brave leader would do something about this.
And, so, because of where we are in the leadership trajectory, I prefer to be defined by people like you. People who are invested in South Africa; who cherish its freedom and speak up when that freedom loses its lustre.
People who give and do and support. I like that, increasingly, we are defined by the talented among us. People such as Lira, Black Coffee and Trevor Noah, and their stratospheric lives have come to the high-water mark of what it means to be South African.
It has been an honour to hold the stewardship of our fine newspaper. I’m sorry if anything I did upset you and thank you for telling me when it did. Loudly. And repeatedly. Onward and upward to you and our fine land. Sharp-sharp.
