Bell Pottinger has toxified political debate in South Africa

The disgraced PR firm did not create our racial problems but it exploited them ruthlessly, giving our struggle for justice a sinister tone
Jacob Zuma reacts during a question and answer session in parliament, Cape Town, on 31 August. Photograph: Nic Bothma/EPA



Image: Indian businessmen Ajay Gupta and younger brother Atul Gupta in 2011. The family of Indian-born tycoons are close to president Jacob Zuma. Photograph: Gallo Images/Getty Images. 

Justice Malala-Wednesday 6 September 2017

You don’t have to look for racial inequality when you land in South Africa. It is everywhere. It is in the spatial arrangements: the pristine formerly whites-only suburbs (where a few of us black people now live) and their high walls, sitting miles away from the sprawling black squatter camps and townships that provide labour for the still – two decades after democracy – white-dominated economy.

The face of unemployment, poverty and poor education is black. The face of prosperity and privilege is white. The numbers are staggering: half of all South Africans are living below the poverty line, and three out of five black people are poor, while poverty is almost nonexistent among white people. In June unemployment among black people was 31%; among white people it was just 6.6%.

This is the powder keg in which Bell Pottinger founder Tim Bell arrived two years ago, when he met the Gupta family, notorious friends of the president, Jacob Zuma. The family is described by academics from four of our top universities as having staged a “silent coup” in South Africa by “capturing the state”.

The academics asserted that the Gupta family – which is in business with Zuma’s son Duduzane and whom the president defends as his “friends” – appoint ministers and senior civil servants to pass government contracts on to them. (Though the Guptas and Zumas all deny any wrongdoing.)

Cynically, Bell Pottinger invented, hyped and disseminated a message that it described as “economic emancipation” of blacks. An “us and them” strategy was devised, based on race: the “whites” are wealthy, racist and benefit their own to the exclusion of blacks. Its aim was to divert South Africa’s attention and deflect criticism away from President Zuma.

They chose the Afrikaner billionaire Johann Rupert as their fall guy, and used him in Twitter messages, Google and Facebook advertisements, newspaper articles, television features and in political messages and speeches by key Zuma allies. The scale of it was incredible. The Times reports that “participants in the fake news empire spread 220,431 tweets between July 2016 and July 2017”.

Did the campaign work? Bell Pottinger and the Guptas did not invent our racial problems. But they exploited them ruthlessly. They threw a match at the tinderbox of inequality and frustration that has persisted since 1994.

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Where the South African people sought to build, they sought to destroy. Where we sought to unify, they divided. The match caught, but didn’t become a wildfire. We are not racial enemies in South Africa, but there is certainly a new racial edge to our discussions.

Our political discourse has been infected. The struggle for economic justice for South Africa’s black majority has taken on a sinister tone. It has an edge to it. The hardline party Black First Land First, for instance, has attacked journalists and demonstrated outside the homes of political activists who have spoken out against the Guptas’ hold over the presidency and the state. The atmosphere echoes Uganda under Idi Amin’s presidency during the 1970s, when citizens of Indian origin were cast as the “monopoly” capitalists of the time.

We are a resilient nation, and we did not swallow the Bell Pottinger line whole. However, refocusing and getting back to rebuilding our nation will take a long time, because Bell Pottinger and the Guptas have left us a toxic gift.

If Bell Pottinger is so sorry about what happened here, why hasn’t it disclosed who briefed it, what the briefs were, and how they operated with these organisations?

The struggle for a united, nonracial, non-sexist and democratic nation, with full social justice for the formerly oppressed, continues. Bell Pottinger distracted us. South African civil society is not defeated. But we are limping.


• Justice Malala is a political commentator and author