Lottery scandal now engulfs SA media credibility

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JEREMY MAGGS: The ongoing and lengthy lottery corruption scandal has now reached deep into the heart of South African journalism.

You might have read that Sunday Times editor and the South African National Editors’ Forum (Sanef) chair, Makhudu Sefara, has been placed on special leave after the Special Investigating Unit (SIU) linked his company to payments from a lottery funded media project. He has denied wrongdoing and says a training event did take place.

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But GroundUp and its founder, Nathan Geffen in particular, had, as I understand, been raising concerns for years about the relationship between sections of the media, the National Lotteries Commission and broad journalistic credibility.

So here’s my question, what happens when the watchdogs themselves become part of the story? Nathan, a very warm welcome, and when did you first begin to worry about the relationship between the commission and parts of the media?

NATHAN GEFFEN: Hi, Jeremy. Yeah, it goes back quite a while, I think as far back as 2019.

We published an article in which we raised concerns about the Sunday World and the way it was reporting on the National Lotteries Commission. At the time, Makhudu Sefara was the editor. This continued over a number of years, there were a number of concerns that we raised.

In 2023, I raised the issue with Sanef about Makhudu’s involvement with the National Lotteries Commission – or at least with the Sunday World – at a time that the Sunday World was getting a disproportionate amount of advertising from the National Lotteries Commission, running puff pieces about the National Lotteries Commission when it was at its most corrupt, and at the same time attacking our reporter, Raymond Joseph, who was covering the story.

So I raised concerns about this, and I said, there needs to be some kind of inquiry into what’s going on.

This came not long after Sanef had spent quite a large amount of money on an inquiry into media ethics. To my mind, if you’re going to talk a big game about media ethics, then you need to actually make sure that your house is clean.

Makhudu Sefara was at this time on the Sanef management committee, and I raised a couple of times, over several months, that we needed to look into this.

Every effort I made was spurned by the people who were in charge of Sanef at the time.

Anton Harber, veteran journalist who started the Weekly Mail in the 1980s, wrote a letter to Sanef pleading with them to have an inquiry into the way National Lotteries Commission advertising was affecting the media, and they refused.

After that happened, there was quite an argumentative meeting at Sanef, and after that, I left Sanef. Then about a year later, Makhudu was elected chair of Sanef. So not only were our concerns rebuffed, but Makhudu was rewarded despite the questions hanging over his head.

Now, I need to emphasise, I don’t know if Makhudu is guilty of anything. There are questions that have been raised.

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He seems to be one of these unfortunate people who always ends up being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and he’s always got an explanation for what happened. Maybe his explanations will hold water. Let’s see. What we asked for was an inquiry and that was rebuffed continuously.

JEREMY MAGGS: Sefara says he did nothing wrong and that a journalists’ training workshop did take place. What do you think in that respect then, Nathan, still needs to be answered?

NATHAN GEFFEN: I need to tell you that the first I heard of the SIU investigation into this R550 000 that was given to Makhudu Sefara’s company in order to hold this workshop, the first I heard of it was yesterday.

It’s not something we’ve ever looked into directly, so I can’t comment on the specifics of that.

What I do know is that at the time that he was the editor of the Sunday World, around about that period, they started getting a disproportionate amount of advertising revenue from the National Lotteries Commission.

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It didn’t make sense in terms of their readership numbers and they were running these puff pieces about the National Lotteries Commission. That was the concern I raised. This is new information that came out yesterday, and we’ll have to wait and see what the SIU finds.

JEREMY MAGGS: How damaging, in your opinion, is this for public trust? When a senior editor or a media body like Sanef is drawn into corruption related allegations?

NATHAN GEFFEN: Well, we’re living in a time when there’s already a lack of trust and lack of confidence by many people in the media or in the so-called mainstream media. I think a lot of that mistrust and lack of confidence is misplaced. But this doesn’t help.

This fuels the conspiracy theories. It fuels the mistrust about big news publications, and it certainly isn’t good for Sanef.

So this is this is bad for our industry.

JEREMY MAGGS: It is bad for the industry. It does raise the important question about whether South African journalism has enough internal accountability when its own leaders are implicated. Because, as you said to me at the start of this conversation, you raised this issue years ago.

NATHAN GEFFEN: Indeed. I think we have to be realistic, journalists are not priests and they’re not elected political leaders. I don’t think we need to hold them to puritanical standards of morality.

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But when there are concerns that money is affecting the way a news publication is reporting on a corrupt institution, that becomes an issue of immense public importance. That’s where trust in the media can be eroded if something has gone wrong there.

JEREMY MAGGS: I’m going to leave it there. Nathan Geffen, thank you very much indeed. He is the founder of the news website GroundUp.