Article from the February 2013 issue of Noseweek Magazine.
Respected journalist and film-maker Sylvia Vollenhoven refuses to be intimidated by the panderings of the SABC to its ANC masters. She is determined that the South African public will see her gripping and incriminating documentary, Project Spear – after it was canned by the lily-livered broadcaster.
The story is never going to go away. It’s only going to get bigger – and I won’t rest until my documentary programme gets broadcast to the South Africans who need to see it.”
So says TV filmmaker and SABC veteran Sylvia Vollenhoven, creator of the documentary Project Spear.
Vollenhoven, who was commissioned last year by the public broadcaster to produce the documentary as part of a new series called Truth Be Told, has spent the past six months trying to reason with SABC bosses, who now appear firmly resolved not to flight the documentary and instead, would prefer to sell it to anyone with the guts to broadcast it.
The film is based on a story which first appeared in Noseweek more than two years ago. It tells of an ex-MI6 spy who presented the South African government with a plan, dubbed Project Spear, to recover billions of rands misappropriated by apartheid-era bankers, officials and politicians from state coffers.
The key question raised in the film is: Why has the ANC government refrained from taking action to recover the money? It has taken no action even though its Security Services commissioned a top-level London private investigations company, Ciex, to establish how public funds were stolen or misappropriated during the apartheid era and despite the fact that the government has been provided with a strategic plan to recover the money.
Senior Reserve Bank executives refused to participate in the documentary, despite the bank’s having been a key player in the original story.
More than 280 Noseweek readers, as well as industry professionals and members of the Right2Know (R2K) movement squeezed into a small basement theatre in December to attend four “guerilla” screenings of Project Spear in Cape Town. The special screenings were arranged after it became known that the public broadcaster was determined to pull the documentary, saying that the government would “not take kindly” to it and that the material was “too sophisticated for SABC2 viewers”.
As Right2Know activist Mallick Bailey, who watched a screening of the movie at Cosatu House in Cape Town put it: “What an insult. It’s easy to understand what’s happening here and the SABC should be forced to inform South Africans about this.” For Bailey, the film is “highly informative” about the corruption that is taking place in South Africa.
“Most people in the audience were outraged by it. This movie portrays the truth and that is why the SABC won’t show it.
“No, there is no way that ordinary South Africans won’t understand this movie. What will happen is that people will relate to it – and their eyes will be opened to what is going on. It is the SABC’s responsibility to inform the people – but the ANC cadres there are reluctant to acknowledge that their leaders are not up to scratch, so everybody in the country is living in denial. They should be forced to show it.”
Vollenhoven says she was spurred on to make the film after reading the story in Noseweek in 2010, and became determined to pursue it in the public interest.
“Many Noseweek stories are about an era when I was a very active journalist. When I read about the Tollgate saga and other issues, it rings a lot of bells. A lot of those stories feel so inconclusive to me, and there is so much unfinished business. For instance, Julian Askin [one-time British chairman of Tollgate] was forced out of South Africa and made to look like the biggest crook ever, but really what happened was something entirely different,” she told Noseweek. “It was a cover-up of something much bigger and a lot more sinister. I thought if the story intrigued me, it must intrigue a lot of other people. I also really wanted to see how I could take such a complex tale, when told in print, and turn it into an audiovisual story for a wider audience.”
Vollenhoven says her proposal, sent to the SABC in January last year, was based mainly on the research Noseweek had done.
“It was very clear the SABC were very interested in the story as they asked a lot of questions about it.”
Soon after, the SABC told Vollenhoven they would commission Project Spear for their planned new series of documentaries to be called Truth Be Told, scheduled to be launched on SABC2 in September. Thrilled, Vollenhoven assembled a team to take the story from the page to the screen.
In April 2012 the “shooting script” was sent to the SABC. The corporation okayed that script and Vollenhoven and her team went ahead with interviews for the documentary.
“More and more information just kept coming in. The challenge was to cut it down so it was not too overwhelming for viewers. But, the story is exactly the same story as told to the SABC right from the start…”
“For 10 years I had been a co-ordinator for INPUT, the International Public Television organisation,” said Vollenhoven. “Every year they showcase the best television produced by the public broadcasters of the world in the public interest. One that stood out for me was done by a Norwegian producer on a complicated investigation into the North Sea oil scandal. They used actors coming and going in a room and lots of voice-over as there was very little archive material. I took my cue from that. I had also seen the movie Bugsy Malone, which I loved – the characters, with innocent faces and ill-fitting suits, playing gangsters.
“We dressed young street dancers in oversize clothes and gangster fedoras and incorporated their hip-hop pantsula and B-Boy moves to demostrate that the people we were talking about in the film, although they might be respected members of society, were nothing more than gangsters. That’s the strong statement the film wants to make.”
By August, Vollenhoven had sent the SABC what is known as a “rough assemble” on a DVD.
“We didn’t hear anything from them so we thought, OK, that’s fine. Based on that, we went into a final edit at the beginning of September and delivered it by courier in mid-September. But that was when things started getting weird. We got an email from Thando Shozi, acting head of ‘factual’ commissioning, who said she had a few problems. The first was that the film was too sophisticated for an SABC2 audience. The second was that the dancers were a distraction and another problem was that it was possibly defamatory, especially of Trevor Manuel.
“One of the quotes from her email was that ‘The government is not going to take kindly to being asked, why are we walking away from recovering so much money?’
“I thought that as investigative journalists, we shouldn’t be in the business of worrying whether the government will take kindly to it…. If the government’s been doing the wrong thing, of course they won’t take kindly to it and if you are doing the right thing that should be your desired result.”
Nevertheless, Shozi’s list was something Vollenhoven thought she could negotiate.
“The discussions were still very amicable. My main objection was that it was coming so late in the process, my budget was finished. There was no more money to go back into editing.
It was a cover-up of something much bigger and a lot more sinister. If the story intrigued me, it must intrigue a lot of other people
“Even at this stage, I remained optimistic, I thought we had enough time, and the documentary would still go out sometime, as the series was scheduled to run until November 4.”
Soon after that, Vollenhoven had a call from Shozi to say the matter had been referred to her boss, the acting head of content enterprises, Gerhard Pretorius. She then heard that he had given a copy to Jimi Matthews, head of news at the SABC.
“When I spoke to Jimi on the telephone, it became clear he was not optimistic that this documentary would see the light of day. He told me it had got to the point in the SABC where the legal people have the final say. It didn’t used to be like that. The ‘legal people’ gave us recommendations about how far we could go, but they had reached the point where ‘the legal people’ have the final say. He said this was not the only piece of journalism that was going to be shelved because the government would not play ball.”
Another SABC source, who asked not to be named, explained: “The party bosses have devised an absurdly simple strategy: refuse to comment on stories that are critical of the government, then press the broadcaster not to run stories because ‘they have failed to obtain government comment’. The government has cottoned on to the fact that that’s how it works at the SABC: if they don’t play along, then the broadcaster doesn’t use the story because they’re too scared.”
Vollenhoven then pushed Pretorius for an official response. The reply came from a range of executives in charge of content and of broadcast compliance.
“Now, instead of just those few things Thando had mentioned, they threw the book at me, saying everything was wrong with it and that I was in contravention on so many levels of the SABC’s editorial code… Then they asked me for research information, and for an annotated script – which has never before happened in the history of the SABC – I sat up nights to do it.”
As a last resort, Vollenhoven offered to pull together all the SABC’s objections and “fix whatever it is, we must be able to fix it”. In the meantime she had been commissioned to do another series for the public broadcaster, a biographical series using musical memories to tell biographical stories, to be called Striking a Chord.
“If Project Spear was so useless, why would they commission me to do, not just one, but four… but I thought OK, if they’ve run out of money – and I know it’s difficult to get the budget to do this – I will do the changes. I was prepared to bend over backwards and use my own money to fix it. I was prepared to re-look at the script and be more sensitive about the potential litigation, to go easier where it is quite hard-hitting. They had problems with the corporate logos used in the film (including those of Absa, Armscor and the SA Reserve Bank). I thought if we had to lose that, it would be OK, because the main story still stands.”
Still Vollenhoven heard “absolutely nothing at all” from the SABC.
Around November, Vollenhoven got wind of the fact that Public Protector Thuli Madonsela was about to release her preliminary report on her investigation of the very same subject matter as Vollenhoven’s documentary: the government’s failure to follow through on the Project Spear recommendations. [Subsequently postponed to the end of January.]
“I wrote to Gerhard Pretorius and suggested if we are going to make changes, we should do them in time for the documentary to be shown when Advocate Madonsela’s report comes out.
“But I also made it clear that if they were no longer interested, I might try raising the finances to buy the rights back from the SABC.”
She received a terse email from Pretorius: “Dear Sylvia, The Business Plan for the sale of Project Spear is being sent around for signatures. Henk Lamberts will contact you to conclude. ”
Vollenhoven believes that for the SABC it’s Hobson’s choice: “If they don’t use the movie it’s a contravention of article 217 of the Constitution in terms of wasteful state expenditure. They’ve commissioned something that didn’t deviate from the original commission and they are not using it. If they opt to recover their expenses and sell me the rights, what they’re saying is that we, the public broadcaster, are relinquishing our responsibility to inform the South African public and are making it quite plain that our primary concern is money and protecting the government’s image.
“So whichever road they choose, it is equally disastrous.”
Does Vollenhoven believe the SABC received a directive from the powers-that-be to pull the programme?
This story is only going to get bigger and I just want to make sure that the documentary gets out there
“No. More than anything, it is sychophantic, scared people who brought about this debacle. A friend who is a senior official in the ANC begged me to put lots of pressure on the SABC and ‘get them to use this bloody thing’. My friend told me the ANC does not want people to think the government is pulling strings at every turn at the SABC ‘because we are not’.
“I believe her. That’s how bad things are at the SABC. All of the people I have been dealing with are in acting positions… Thando Shozi, Gerhard Pretorius – and others – so everybody is insecure and frightened and, maybe, ambitious.”
Determined not to let the matter rest, Vollenhoven’s plan of action is to insist the SABC provides the promised business plan, a precursor to the sale of the rights.
“If they do come with a serious offer to sell, I will go out and find funders and start talking to broadcasters. If we raise enough money we can even bypass the broadcasters… If we don’t get enough interest – say, from e-TV or DSTV – we can make it go viral on the internet, that’s the other option,” says Vollenhoven.
“This story is only going to get bigger and I just want to make sure that the documentary gets out there. My first priority is to pressurise the SABC, because it has a responsibility to show this to the people who paid for it. But if they don’t, I will make sure that we find an alternative avenue, whether it is the internet or a combination of the internet and other broadcasters, so that all South Africans can see what is happening. This is a story that’s indicative of what’s wrong with our society, and the kind of stuff we are trying to push under the carpet. This is only one issue. If we just allow it to get pushed under the carpet, there are so many other things we don’t know about. I can’t possibly give up on it. It’s just not possible…”
In the meantime, London solicitor William Humphreys, project manager for John Risley, the Canadian financier who is sponsoring related court cases in various countries, was back in South Africa in December to get the ball rolling on German shareholder Michael Diirr’s case against the SA Reserve Bank. He wants the matter taken to the World Bank’s ICSID (International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes) to prepare for a possible class action suit aimed at recovering the money on behalf of the citizens of South Africa and to “prepare the ground” for a case in which Michael Oatley will seek to recover the fees he would have earned had the government proceeded to recover the lost billions.
“They are very determined. This story is going to develop into something big,” says Vollenhoven
His Master’s Voice
The obdurate stance of the SABC reinforces the perception that the public broadcaster is nothing more than “His Master’s Voice” – demonstrated by a range of recent decisions.
- In 2006, the SABC withdrew an unauthorized documentary on then-President Thabo Mbeki which it had commissioned producers Redi Direko and Ben Cashdan of the production company Broad Daylight Films to produce – prompting the accusation by Direko that this was an “ill-conceived and politically motivated” decision.
- In November last year, two hours before it was scheduled to be flighted for the first time, the SABC banned an animated advertisement for The Fish & Chip Co, which depicted President Jacob Zuma and his large family sitting at an extremely long dining-room table, eating a takeaway meal. The advert, which kicked off with the words, “Dinner time at Nkandla”, then went on to show a woman, saying in Zulu, “Oh Zuzulicious, we’re having fish and chips from Shabba today”, to which the animated president answered: “Eat up, honey bunch, there is a lot of good food here. It’s from the Fish and Chip Company. There are many of you in this house, at only R25, even Pravin will approve this.”
- Earlier this year, the SABC’s head of news, Jimi Matthews, sent an email to his news editors in which he forbade all of news staff, to refer to Zuma’s private Nkandla property as a “homestead” or “compound” and banned the use of the words “Nkandlagate” or “Zumaville” in the SABC’s reporting, after Zuma’s spokesman Mac Maharaj criticised the word compound, saying it was a term from the country’s racial past, used by white South Africans to refer to homes for “black migrant workers”.
- And, a week or so before the ANC’s elective conference in Mangaung, three journalists who were scheduled to discuss media coverage during the run-up to the conference on Metro FM were told they would no longer be taking part in the radio show – because an ANC representative was not part of the panel being interviewed.
- Then, in December, the SABC canned a pre-recorded Interface show on SABC3 because it featured an interview with cartoonist Jonathan Shapiro, otherwise known as Zapiro, following “orders from above”.