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It’s faced claims of defamation and some law experts say its premise may even be illegal. No Excuse, Pay Papgeld is morally questionable television, writes Rofhiwa Maneta.
No Excuse, Pay Papgeld
Moja Love (DStv channel 157)
Saturday, 7.30pm
1 star out of 5
In December, in a not-yet-aired episode, No Excuse, Pay Papgeld presenter Moss Makwati and his crew were beaten up.
According to an article in Sunday World, Makwati and his crew were allegedly assaulted after gate-crashing a wedding to confront a man about his failure to pay maintenance for his three children from a previous relationship. Not taking kindly to the surprise appearance, the groom’s family allegedly pelted the show’s crew with stones and other objects.
Anyone who regularly watches the show will tell you that this has been a long time coming.
Papgeld bills itself as a “social responsibility” programme, and the premise is simple enough – mothers write to the show’s producers in an effort to expose fathers who’ve defaulted on their maintenance payments. The show, with the help of an anonymous private investigator called Ghost, tracks down the alleged defaulter to “hear his side of the story”.
In reality, it’s an incendiary piece of tabloid television that’s more interested in provocation than in getting maintenance defaulters to own up to their responsibilities.
Makwati’s modus operandi involves bum-rushing the alleged defaulters. This technique is somewhat understandable as most of the men on the show are eluding the mother of their children, so it makes sense to “pounce” on them when they least expect it.
Where things fall apart, however, is in the way the interviews are conducted once the suspects are tracked down. On more than one occasion, defaulters have been parked in and have struggled to leave when they refuse to be interviewed. On other occasions, the men will object to interviews and explicitly say they haven’t given their permission to be filmed. Here, Makwati employs his signature faux naïf, rattling on about how he’s “here as a representative of the child”.
The problem is, the entire thing could be illegal. According to a City Press interview with lawyer Zola Majavu in December, the show is “an invasion of privacy of the worst kind” and, by revealing the identity of the mother and the father, the child’s identity is inadvertently revealed as well.
There was a case in March last year where a father sent an interdict to stop an episode he was part of from being aired.
He said the show defamed him because it publically accused him of not paying child maintenance, even though he had.
Channel head Jacqueline Rainers Setai said that the episode would be aired, and that the dispute was that the father was paying too little maintenance, not that he wasn’t paying any maintenance.
In recent episodes, the show seems to have upped the ante in terms of melodrama. In last week’s episode, socialite Nico Matlala drives off while the alleged mother of his child grabs him through the driver’s window.
“What child do I have with you?” asks Matlala, while Makwati harps on about responsibility, doing the right thing and “hearing both sides of the story”.
Entertaining TV, but to what end? Does the show help facilitate DNA tests in the case of disputed paternity? Are there in-house lawyers at hand to force the fathers to cough up their papgeld? Or does the show paddle in the same moral morass as Maury and Jerry Springer?
Absenteeism and maintenance defaulting are serious issues. Pay Papgeld would do well to treat them as such instead of using people’s legitimate pain as wallpaper for ratings.
