🔒 The Editor’s Desk: Steinhoff, the Watsons, & the need for balance

Some of the best stories have a clear villain and a clear hero  that’s why people love Star Wars. But real life is sometimes more like Game of Thrones, with no heroes, no villains, just complex human beings making the decisions that seem best to them. We were reminded of that this week as Alec Hogg’s interviews with Jared Watson and Brian Mostert shone some interesting new light on Bosasa’s Gavin Watson and Steinhoff’s Markus Jooste. While both men must, ultimately, be convicted or exonerated – not necessarily in the courts, but at least in our minds – based on material evidence, testimony from those who knew them paints different portraits and gives different perspectives. As Alec and I discuss in this week’s episode, it’s a good reminder of the importance of seeking balance, especially in he said, situations where people are condemned based on witness testimony and little else. – Felicity Duncan

Hello and welcome to this week’s episode of The Editor’s Desk here on Biznews Radio with me, Felicity Duncan, and Biznews editor in chief Alec Hogg.
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Alec, one of the things that we’ve talked about – quite frequently, actually, on our show – is the importance of balance, the importance of not necessarily accepting the word of one person as gospel but maintaining a critical mindset. Maintaining a mindset that seeks out both sides of any story and tries to look for evidence as opposed to just “he said, she said, they said, we said” – evidence really being at the heart of what journalism is all about.

And this week, there’s been some interesting perspectives that you’ve been gathering on stories that, I think, for a long time have been very one-sided. And I’m thinking here particularly both about the Watson family and the whole the Bosasa saga and the interesting work you’ve been doing on that side, and then also Steinhoff, your discussion with former Tekkie Town CEO Bernard Mostert. Both of these stories were ones that everyone had a very clear perspective on and it was very much on one side and there was little critical investigation of this and I think that’s shifted, at least for us this week. Would you like to talk a bit about that process.

To me, we must never forget that journalism is like a journal that always has two sides to a story. It doesn’t mean that you have to give equal balance to both sides, because often, if you have a murderer who’s murdered somebody, well, he’s done that and then you might look at his upbringing and say, that would be partly to blame, as a court of law would do and those would be extenuating circumstances. But generally speaking, it’s pretty clear what the facts are in that matter.

But the problem that we are finding increasingly, I believe in journalism and particularly in South Africa, a young democracy, a developing country, a country where there is a tendency amongst the media owners to replace the wise old heads, if you can put it that way, certainly those with institutional memory, with the bodies who perhaps have not been exposed to the hard knocks that you get from getting stuff wrong.

And as a consequence of that, it’s very often a one-sided, almost a single dimension approach to articles. And we’re seeing the danger of that now, increasingly, when you start off with something like the whole Bosasa saga.

Remember that when you go to a court of law, everybody puts in the affidavit. So you’ll have an affidavit from the one side and evidence from the other side and the truth is up to the court or the judge to determine.

Read also: Markus Jooste hits back; says Steinhoff demand for return of R850m in pay ‘vague, embarrassing’

In journalism, we have to also bear that in mind and often don’t seem to be doing that. And the case in point here is at the Zondo Commission, we had this sensational testimony by Angelo Agrizzi. He was the chief operating officer of Bosasa, who said that, yes I did lots of things wrong, but I was manipulated and told to do them by my boss Gavin Watson. And that’s really the essence of it.

Nobody approached Gavin Watson to say, “Are you prime evil? What did you do? Why did you do this?”

No one really went and dug into his circumstances to discover, if they had done so, that he lives in a two-bedroomed flat in Krugersdorp, whereas his chief operating officer lived seriously in the lap of luxury, with many supercars and so on. And only now is that coming to the fore. Only now are people starting to ask those questions and we are seeing it more and more.

When I first interviewed Valence Watson, who was the third of the Watson brothers and is a guy that I met through our former colleague Barry Sergeant, our late colleague Barry Sergeant, who is a great investigative reporter because he would check all sides of the story. He never ever went with just one side. And when I met him and interviewed him and put that forward, we were roundly criticised for allowing, in essence, people who were telling lies – that is what we were criticised of doing.

And it was almost like one-way traffic. I remember, we had the same with the Guptas in 2016, up until the #GuptaLeaks were released, it was almost like everything that we were writing about the Guptas was being either ignored or criticised from other quarters.

But, of course, when it came to the leaks in 2017, the whole narrative changed. And it is a similar thing. I think that now the supposed prime primeval is shown to have been actually a grandfather who was married for 38 years, with four grandkids and three kids and was a chap who really had done a lot of work in the struggle, from a family that sacrificed a great deal in that time. They are a deeply Christian family in their own beliefs. They don’t drink, they don’t swear, they don’t screw around, and they generally pray a lot and all of that was written off on the testimony of Agrizzi at Zondo Commission as hypocrisy.

So, whatever they said, the narrative was, well these guys are a bunch of hypocrites anyway. Look at how they’ve looted the country. But suddenly, there’s a sense that, well, maybe it isn’t all exactly as it seems.

And that really was, again, a very good lesson for us at Biznews and I think another lesson for South Africa and for the media generally, is that nothing is 100 percent wrong or 100 percent right. Nobody is in that camp. There’s always shades. Life is grey, it’s not black or white and we sometimes forget that.

And I think that the Watson story is really reminding us of that, that if you put your neck out there to make assessments when actually the complexities are always such that you don’t really even start to know what you don’t know, is a very dangerous way of approaching our craft.

I think, for me, one of the things that has been troubling about a lot of reporting on different things – so, I’m not necessarily speaking specifically here about the Watson’s or Steinhoff or anything in particular, just in general – is the reliance on what people say and the de-emphasis on what you might call physical evidence.

So, I’m thinking, you know there’s a lot of talk in South Africa about having mandatory asset disclosures, for example, where financial institutions would be responsible, maybe, or people would be responsible for disclosing fully the list of assets that they own. Anything that’s attached to their ID numbers or their families, whatever the case may be, just to provide factual context.

Because so much of what we’re seeing reported and so much, even, of what we’re seeing at the Zondo Commission, as you use it as an example, is just verbal testimony. And you know, even if people are being honest, one person’s perspective on a series of events can be very different from another person’s. I mean, if you’ve ever been in an argument with your husband or wife or partner, you know that’s true. So, I think, for me, something that’s really been missing is this insistence on people not just saying things but proving what they say in some way.

I like that and I like the asset-based approach because it is fact-based. People can still hide assets away, that’s pretty easy to do. But then they’re taking a massive risk of perjury, which can land them in jail.

So, there is no perfect approach towards this, but at least let’s get halfway. Let’s just follow the money to begin with or follow the money that we can understand and appreciate or are able to track down. The narrative is very easily spun. And that was the point I was getting back to, trying to get to it right in the beginning, which is we have in a democracy a court of law and a court of public opinion.

Now the court of law, you will have two people giving their perspectives in affidavits and the media, which is the court of public opinion, should not go to the court of law and only focus on the one affidavit and only report on the one affidavit. Their job is actually to report on both and to say, well okay, so this guy says that the neighbour cut down the tree in a fit of pique. The other guy, the neighbour, says that this chap has been shouting over the fence and using the tree to hop over and to steal stuff from his garden and as a result, he cut the tree down.

So, it’s really to try and get both sides of the story. But we seem increasingly to forget that in the court of public opinion in the search for click bait, for headlines, for juniorisation of newsrooms etc., and it really is a reminder that we’ve really got to look at both sides of the story and that there are always two sides to every single story.

Read also: Steinhoff CEO Louis du Preez answers: When is Markus Jooste going to jail?

Steinhoff is such a good example. You’ve got a guy who was a sociopath, who stole money from shareholders by using an audit firm in Germany to fudge the accounts, put through fictitious invoices, bloat the revenue numbers, and he really has come across in every single bit of reporting as this extremely evil, nasty, narcissistic human being called Markus Jooste.

And then we talked to Braam van Huyssteen and Bernard Mostert this week from Tekkie Town, a company that was effectively bought for R3.3bn in Steinhoff script by Jooste, who knew exactly that the Steinhoff script was worthless.

And yet Braam van Huyssteen is saying, I’ll forgive this guy. It doesn’t mean that I don’t want my money back, I don’t want my company back – I want that back. But he might have been influenced by other circumstances and, indeed, he did not act alone.

So, at this point in time, all we know – we’ve got Jooste as the prime evil, he’s supposedly the mastermind, who has caused the mess that is now called Steinhoff, but actually everybody else around him, who acted with him, has been ignored in the focus on the one individual. And Braam van Huyssteen and Bernard Mostert in the interview this week are reminding us that, no, there were other people there as well. And as much as you do blame Jooste for what happened, you can’t blame him alone.

And I think it’s that kind of broader colour, that greater perspective, that appreciation of the complexities of life, which is something that we should never forget in our quest in journalism, in the quest in the media to get more readers, more eyeballs and more sensationalism.

Absolutely.

Now talking about complexity, we have coming up next week the World Economic Forum Africa meeting happening in Cape Town.

And that is always something in which complexity features very strongly, because the meeting addresses a lot of questions and issues that are facing economies right across the continent, which is a very diverse place, a place with a lot of very different types of economies, from a sophisticated economy like South Africa down to far less more agricultural-dependent economies, maybe, up in the west of Africa. And we are going to be doing some coverage of that.

Yes, I’ll be there.

This time round they’ve asked me to facilitate a session as well, which is going to be quite fun. That’s on how to promote investment into Africa.

But more and more as I have been exposed to the World Economic Forum, the meeting in January and now this, the regular event in Africa – we have a regional forum every second year. It’s held in Cape Town. It then moves to another part of the continent. Last time, last year, I think, was in Rwanda. I know I’ve attended events in Dar es Salaam and in Mozambique in Maputo.

So it’s an opportunity, when you go to these regional events, to see other parts of the world or other parts of the continent. But more and more, what strikes me about this is the way that we can learn from each other.

There was this arrogance in the past that South Africa was the biggest economy on the continent and South Africa was the one that everyone else should be learning from, when in essence that’s not really the case.

Getting back to what we spoke about last week with GG Alcock, he made the point that if you were to only assess the formal economy in Nigeria, in the same way that we only assess the formal economy in South Africa, well, then it would be a tiny place, with maybe only 5% of the total economic activity being in the formal sector.

So, we can learn more from how lesser developed countries on this continent are actually handling things like the informal sector. Because if you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it. And if you can start measuring it, you can start adapting to it and adopting policies towards it.

There’s so much that the countries on this continent can learn from each other, being in different stages of development and having different pockets of the economies that are like other parts of the world.

If you go to… where I spent quite a lot of time just outside Bronkhorstspruit, when I was involved with the St Joseph’s outreach mission, which is HIV and looking at the difficulties in those areas. If you look at the townships there, which have just sprung out of the informal sector, a place called Dark City, because there’s no electricity, or never has been electricity there and so on…

And some of those places, you get a sense that is probably exactly the same condition as you would have in parts of very underdeveloped Mozambique or go further north, Tanzania and so on.

So, there’s so much that one can learn from others and the beginning of learning is humility and contact and communication. And this World Economic Forum event, the Africa summit, has grown in stature over many years. And I think more and more – Cyril Ramaphosa calls his government, his administration, a listening government.

And I think we’re going to find a lot of listening going on from South Africans at the WEF in Cape Town next week and I’m really looking forward to seeing that, to witnessing that. Because in the past the attitude really was, well, we are the biggest and the most advanced and we know what we’re doing and don’t tell us anything. Whereas that arrogance is now pretty much out of the picture with the new administration, not least because this country is struggling, at the moment, economically.