LITMIR.BIZ

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through the night to homes and outlets in far-flung towns across the Western Cape. The front-page lead in that edition was a careful report by environment reporter Melanie Gosling about the findings of the Public Protector, Thuli Madonsela, on a fish monitoring contract awarded by the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries. The R800 million tender for the management of the country’s fisheries research and patrol vessels had already had a stormy history. Four of the six short-listed bidders were closely related to a single parent company, Sekunjalo Investments. One of the others was the current holder of the tender, Smit Amandla Marine.

      On 24 November 2011, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Minister Tina Joemat-Pettersson announced that the tender had been awarded to Sekunjalo Marine Services Consortium (SMSC), one of the four bidders linked to Sekunjalo.

      Smit Amandla promptly launched a court challenge to set the award aside, alleging irregularities in the process and possible collusion by the four Sekunjalo-linked bidders. Smit Amandla and Democratic Alliance (DA) MP Pieter van Dalen also asked the Public Protector to investigate.

      In February 2012, Sekunjalo Investments chief executive officer Khalid Abdulla informed the department that Sekunjalo would not fight Smit Amandla in court and would withdraw from the tender, which was then cancelled by the department. The fish monitoring process was handed over to the South African Navy.

      But Madonsela continued her investigation, and the report she released on 5 December 2013 was explosive. Madonsela found that the award of the contract to SMSC to manage the department’s fleet of research and patrol boats was ‘improper’. Acting Fisheries director Joseph Sebola had given Sekunjalo top marks of 5/5 during the tender evaluation process while scoring rival bidder Smit Amandla, which had ten years of appropriate experience, 1/5 – behaviour which the Public Protector described as ‘irrational, subjective and biased’.

      Madonsela said Joemat-Pettersson had interfered with her investigation by trying to get Justice Minister Jeff Radebe to call off the probe. In Joemat-Pettersson’s opinion, the probe was ‘unnecessary’ since the Sekunjalo contract had by then been withdrawn.

      Madonsela also found that giving the patrol vessels tender to a Sekunjalo company while its subsidiary Premier Fishing had fishing rights put Sekunjalo in the position of ‘referee and player’. She referred this issue to the Competition Commission for further investigation, but recommended that President Jacob Zuma take disciplinary action against Joemat-Pettersson for her ‘reckless dealing with state money and services, resulting in fruitless and wasteful expenditure, loss of confidence in the fisheries industry in South Africa, alleged decimation of fisheries resources in South Africa and delayed quota allocations due to lack of appropriate research’. Madonsela wrote: ‘How this company even got beyond the clerical point of bid checking … is totally perplexing.’ She found the Fisheries Minister guilty of maladministration, unethical conduct, wasteful expenditure and ‘reckless dealing with state money’.

      By any standards this was a big story, and the Cape Times led its early edition with Gosling’s report under the headline ‘Protector lays down law – Zuma “should take action against fisheries minister”’ and included a picture of Joemat-Pettersson.

      Independent Newspapers’ new proprietor Iqbal Survé was also chairman of Sekunjalo. ‘It was not lost on anyone in the newsrooms that by covering this story, we would be writing about our new owners, and about their apparent involvement in a questionable deal,’ says Gosling. ‘I remember feeling slightly nervous about that. Iqbal Survé was new to us and we did not know what to expect. At the same time there was no doubt in my mind that the story had to be covered, in the same way that we would cover any other company involved in a similar case.’

      Working first from her notes from a television broadcast about the report, and later from the full published report when it was emailed to the media, Gosling wrote her story. That story was to cost Alide Dasnois her job.

      2

      Fired

      On Friday, 6 December 2013, the day after the death of Nelson Mandela, a few people on the Cape Times staff were at work. Usually no one at the newspaper worked on Fridays (the working week was Sunday to Thursday) but this was no ordinary Friday. Though there would be no issue of the newspaper on the following day, there was plenty of work to do on the editions for the following week. The Cape Times, like newspapers across the country, had prepared a detailed plan for coverage of the aftermath of Mandela’s death, from news reports and ‘colour pieces’ – writing that focuses mainly on impressions or descriptions – to analysis, photo essays and tributes of all sorts.

      ‘I wasn’t meant to be working, but Mandela’s death was something young reporters had been primed for, for years,’ says reporter Caryn Dolley. Another of the younger reporters, Michelle Jones, remembers being phoned by news editor A’Eysha Kassiem and asked to cover the mayor’s press conference tribute to Mandela. She arrived in the newsroom to find Dolley already there. ‘A’Eysha hadn’t asked her to be there. Caryn simply showed up because she realised it would be necessary. That was how we worked in the Cape Times newsroom,’ Jones says. ‘We worked on our days off. We showed up when we hadn’t been asked to. We did what was necessary because we loved news and we loved the newspaper.’ Together, Dolley and Jones updated the Cape Times Twitter feed and Facebook posts and decided which events each would cover.

      In the editor’s office, Alide Dasnois was paging through the special four-page Mandela edition of the paper that she and her team had produced the night before. Though the other newspapers in the Independent group had chosen rather to change the first few pages and to leave the other pages untouched, Cape Town morning newspaper Die Burger and the Daily Dispatch in East London had also produced a special edition, wrapped around the previous edition of the paper.

      Editor-in-chief Chris Whitfield came in. ‘Your guys did a good job,’ he said. But not everyone thought so.

      Sandy Naudé, the general manager at Independent Newspapers in Cape Town, contacted Dasnois and Whitfield separately from her office on the floor above them and called them to meetings with Iqbal Survé, the new owner, at the Vineyard Hotel. The previous day the plush Newlands hotel, with its manicured lawns that stretch down to the Liesbeek River, had been the scene of Survé’s first ‘lekgotla’ – strategy meeting – with his senior staff, at which he had spoken about his vision for the newspapers and told them about himself. The Friday meetings took place in a small room on the ground floor of the hotel with some of the senior executives who had attended that lekgotla – chief executive Tony Howard, Naudé and Whitfield. Survé first wanted to discuss seconding Whitfield to a project in the Eastern Cape and giving him responsibility for the launch of new titles.

      When Dasnois arrived, the meeting with Whitfield was still under way and she was asked to return in a few minutes. On Dasnois’s return, Survé asked her why she had not changed the front page of the first edition of the Cape Times to reflect Mandela’s death, instead of printing a wraparound. Taken aback, Dasnois said she did not have enough staff to remake the whole newspaper and had done her best with the four-page special edition.

      ‘The real problem,’ said Howard, ‘is that you led with this again,’ and he held up the first edition of the newspaper with the front-page lead about the report by Public Protector Madonsela on the Department of Fisheries contract in which some of Survé’s companies were involved. Before Dasnois could respond, Howard said that it was ‘all in the past’ anyway, and the present meeting was intended to focus on the future, including a new project for Dasnois.

      Survé explained that he had decided that Dasnois’s point of view was not suitable for the Cape Times, too ideologically left and not ‘business friendly’ enough. He said he personally liked reading articles on alternative economics, but that sort of thing was not good for the Cape Times and the newspaper needed a new editor. He said he wanted Dasnois to work on a ‘Labour Bulletin’, which would include some business news, some economics and some labour coverage, and which would attract advertising from the trade unions. The new ‘bulletin’ might or might not be part of the group’s business daily, Business Report (which she had previously edited), and might instead be weekly or monthly. Dasnois would report directly

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