Phakamile Hlubi-Majola
Good morning everybody thank you so much for having me, my name is Phakamile Hlubi-Majola, but you can call me Parks. I represent the National Union of Metal Workers of South Africa. I'm its national spokesperson. NUMWSA is the largest trade union in South Africa representing over 350,000 middle workers, so greetings on behalf of 350,000 middle workers.
I'm honored to be one of the guest panelists of this very important communication conference, and I'm especially excited to be here in China. I have never been to China, and I must say I'm very impressed. This has been a wonderful experience so far.
And for me, I really feel like this conference is coming at a very important time because it is focusing on communication as a tool for solidarity. At the end of the conference, we must be able to answer what is the best strategy to achieve the solidarity and how do we go about it.
For this panel, I'll be focusing on media and class struggle in South Africa, and basically the purpose of what I'm presenting is just to talk about our challenges as an organization in trying to expand the voices of the working class. And this for me is something that is quite close to my heart.
I'm a former journalist before working at NUMWSA, I used to work at corporate media for 10 years. I worked in some very well-known media organizations in South Africa. Eyewitness News being one of them, EWN. And the only reason I mention I Witness News is because I actually heard about Paula Slier through I witness EWN when I was a journalist. She used to be a correspondent for IWN and I'm a fan.
So it's really wonderful for me to on this platform discussing this issue. When I started as a journalism and as a journalist.
I remember my 1st day of the job at EWN, my editor asked me, so Phakamile, what do you think your job is as a journalist, and my response was,oh to defend the defenseless, to be a voice to the voiceless. So excited. And she looked at me, she said, no that's not your job, your job is to get content for the benefit of advertisers. And I must say that for her to be so explicit about the fact that this is exactly what media does, that they are actually operating to defend and advance the interests of advertisers and corporate, that was a real eye opening experience for me.
And what she said largely defines the attitude of media in South Africa. South African media is extremely corporate, it's extremely neoliberal. It unashamedly advances the interests of western imperialism. And this is and this is how it is across the board, whether you're looking at public corporations, because we do have a huge public corporation known as the SABC, the South African Broadcasting Corporation. Across the South African media landscape. When you come to South Africa you can turn on any radio station, go on to any TV channel, what you will hear is a narrative which advances imperialism which advances neocapitalism and neocolonialism and particularly a narrative which is anti-working class, anti-black and very hostile to any kind of alternative view.
And this issue was actually highlighted in 2012 when mine workers in South Africa in the northwest in an area called Marikana embarked on a lengthy strike. I don't know if some of you are aware, but I'll give you some details.
Marikana is a place which is a very poor place in the northwest and right there in Marikana, that's where Lonmin Mines is based, Lonmin Mines being the platinum provider. And workers in 2012 in August embarked on an unprotected strike. That strike action ended in 34 of them being shot live on TV by a member of the South African police services.
The Marikana massacre has come to define what South Africa is today a country that was liberated by the progressive ANC government, by the ANC back then anyway which now actively oppresses the working class, and what ironic about what happened in Marikana is that the decision taken by the police to shoot at unarmed workers was triggered by an email sent by Cyril Ramaphosa who is our president today. Cyril was sitting on the board of Lonmin. He wrote an email to members of the security cluster and they responded with heavy handedness to these workers who were unarmed.
And the narrative that emerged from the media about the Marikana massacre that's what it's called now is a narrative where the media blame the workers they blame the workers for the protest, they positioned them as violent savages who basically, in the view of the media, if they were massacred, because it was their fault.
You know, the African media never views capitalism as violent if you'd actually gone to Marikana at that time. And I was a practicing journalist at that time, so I did spend a lot of time in Marikana. The violence of capitalism is expressed there, the entire area is undeveloped. There's no sanitation, there's no decent housing, there's no electricity, and yet one of the biggest platin firms extract its wealth from that area and gives nothing back to the community.
And that's ultimately what workers that Marikana were fighting for they were fighting for a better life.
And what should have happened is that when you had a man like Ramaphosa who himself was actually a trade unionist who helped form the national union of mine workers is ironic that the very same person was the person who actually inspired the security forces to react with so much violence.
I would urge you to read an analysis just done by a lady called Ilva Gomerday of University of Johannesburg where she did research on how the reporting at Marikana was in her view characterized by, quote, embedded journalism, sensationalism and polarization of views. She says that it showed that the media was a powerful loudspeaker for the interests of South African political and social economic nexus neglecting the fundamental problems underlining labor relations in South Africa.
Another classic example of the kind of hostility and intolerance that the South African media has to alternative views is how they have covered the issue of the war in Ukraine. It is a completely one-sided narrative. There is absolutely no tolerance for dissenting views on the issue in South Africa.
I can say almost all media platforms especially those so called independence have described it as an invasion by Russia. They are criticizing the south African government for being neutral on this issue and they will not tolerate any dissenting voices.
Part of the reason why I'm so exhausted while I stand here is because I was engaged in a Twitter debate last night with one of these writing journalists who was so offended by my comments when I said that South Africa should not get involved in this war. We should advance our own interest as a nation and at the end of the day this is not neutral,this is about NATO aggression.
Do you know what his response to me was, oh it means that, NUMWSA supports the slaughtering of babies. This is the kind of mentality that you're dealing with in the South African media discourse, where you cannot even engage in a nuanced debate on issues because the framework that dominates in south African media is a framework which is defined by the west, which is defined by Bretton Woods institutions where they are advancing the ownership that the continuation of imperialism in all of these newsrooms.
At the same time there is a real fear or an hatred of communism and the fact that Russia is involved has sort of raised. These issues again because during apartheid communism was something that the apartheid government was obsessed with so this is this has become an issue and this is why I was saying to you that it's really important that we're here discussing these issues. I really enjoyed the input from Professor Vijay Prashad who spoke about the suffocating nature of corporate media and really that is the perfect description because there is no space for alternative views. And even if you offer a different opinion you'll be labelled.
So just to briefly go through the landscape, in South Africa, they are 40 commercial and public broadcast stations the largest media house by far is SABC and they have over 30 million viewers in the country. They remain the most popular news platform and of course they also have many radio stations which are very popular.
However, unfortunately, even though the SABC is a public broadcaster, its narrative has been heavily influenced by these right-wing's so called independent media houses, so they also turn out the same propaganda that many of these organizations do.
So how has NUMWSA managed in this space? NUMWSA strategy has been to unashamedly promote the working class and to promote our message of Marxist Leninism.
And the reason we're able to even get to a point where we are, whether they like it or not, they broadcast the message every day; every statement we issue, they broadcast, is because NUMWSA says power is not just in the media its power is on the ground, its power is in the 350,000 middle workers who shut down the economy when they go on strike.
So even if they can't stand us, they can't ignore us. And I think at the end of the day, whatever media strategy that we are going to build, we must ensure that we take the movements with us, we must ensure that the working class are the ones who are actually driving that agenda, that are the ones who are driving that message, because that's where the real power lies.
Part of the work that we have been doing in order to advance the agenda is some of the training that we've been doing at the school in Bella Bella. This work for us is actually the key to tackling the suffocating narrative that we see in the media and Doctor M'membe was absolutely right when he said you cannot rely on imperialists to drive your message, we must build our own platforms. And that's exactly what the Bella Bella school is doing. The school is in Bella Bella, but this year we actually had it in Ghana which was really exciting. I love Ghana I enjoy going there every time I go.
And it was really very interesting experience to engage with these students. We get students from all over the continent and obviously in Brazil and and other places where we have relationships. And we basically take them through media training and in that process we learn a lot about the conditions that are facing the working class in those different parts of the world.
And we have also established partnerships with organizations like Peoples Dispatch. We've also been working very closely with PAT TV. We've actually done some work with TeleSur in the past hoping to build on that in this conference.
So really I think the key to us being able to defeat this crisis that we're facing is to continue this work, to actually build this platform, to build this alternative for the majority of people. We are the majority we should dominate, we should not be spending our time begging for air time from right wingers; we should be the ones that should dominate the narrative and ultimately that is what we should be striving for.
I'm really grateful that we have the opportunity to do this, that we can find solutions, and I really look forward to hearing from some of you about other ways that we can deepen this interaction. But at the end of the day, when we walk away from this conference, we must strengthen these networks so that as we go into the future. It must be the voice of the majority that is dominating our media discourse and not the voice of the elite minority that is responsible for our suffering.
Thank you.