Wednesday, September 6, 2017

How PR giant Bell Pottinger made itself look bad




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So … the thing is.
Shutterstock



The reputation of global PR company Bell Pottinger has suffered a massive blow. The boss has resigned, clients have walked, the firm has been expelled from the Public Relations and Communications Association (PRCA) – and it has now put itself up for sale. All because of its work on a controversial contract in South Africa.

Bell Pottinger, which has staff, partners and offices in many parts of the world, is headquartered in London. So when the South African political party the Democratic Alliance wanted to complain about the firm’s activities, the London-based PRCA was its chosen route.

The whole issue of ethics and regulation in public relations is a thorny one. In virtually every country, anyone can call themselves a PR practitioner. I am an accredited practitioner with all sorts of qualifications, but there is nothing in law to stop my neighbour, a plumber, from hanging out a sign saying he is a PR officer, too.

But thanks to a drive from industry professionals there have been efforts to promote ethics and ensure some sort of regulation, which practitioners and companies can choose to sign up to.

In the UK, there is the PRCA (mostly for organisations) and the CIPR (mostly for individual practitioners). Each has codes of conduct and disciplinary processes. Each can censure and expel. Ethical practitioners hope that clients will equate membership with high standards.

The PRCA’s expulsion of Bell Pottinger is the most serious sanction it can take, and follows an investigation, a provisional ruling and an appeal. But now Bell Pottinger is out, and it cannot apply to rejoin for at least five years.

According to PRCA Director General Francis Ingham:

Bell Pottinger has brought the PR and communications agency into disrepute … The PRCA has never before passed down such a damning indictment of an agency’s behaviour.

Bell Pottinger was founded in part by Sir Tim (now Lord) Bell in 1987. Advising former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher on her presentational style, he became one of the biggest names in PR. The firm did not shy away from controversial clients, who included former South African president FW de Klerk, Asma al-Assad, the wife of Syrian president Bashir al-Assad, and the South African athlete Oscar Pistorius, after he was accused of murder.

Lord Bell himself resigned from the company last year. And in an interview with the BBC’s Newsnight (which was twice interrupted by his mobile phone ringing) he said this latest episode was “almost certainly” the end.







Experts in keeping up appearances, the firm no doubt regrets the work it carried out for the wealthy Gupta family, which has close links to South Africa’s president Jacob Zuma.

The British PR firm got into trouble with a social media “economic emancipation campaign” in which the phrase “white monopoly capital” was said to have been deliberately, or irresponsibly, used, stirring up racial tension.

South Africa’s opposition Democratic Alliance accused Bell Pottinger of a “hateful and divisive campaign to divide South Africa along the lines of race”.

The scandal led to resignations – and the loss of clients. Britain’s biggest bank, HSBC, has said it would no longer use Bell Pottinger. A Swiss luxury company headed by a South African businessman, a South African investment group, and Acacia, which owns gold mines in Tanzania, are also reportedly off the books.

The damage to the company’s reputation is immense. While Bell Pottinger did take on work for clients which some of us find offensive or “to be avoided”, there is a difference between a client with a bad reputation deserving some help, and creating a bad reputation through the very act of communication.

Is all publicity still good publicity?


Will nations and companies still want to hire the company in the future? Some will probably take the attitude that recent events do not affect the organisation’s ability to carry out its work.

But will journalists and other PR audiences be ready to accept the firm’s messages? Probably not. The first response of any journalist contacted by a Bell Pottinger spokesperson will surely be to think of this damning incident. It will be tough for any lobbying campaign to carry conviction with the Bell Pottinger name attached.

Of course, being expelled from a professional association does not take away the ability to practice. The Democratic Alliance itself has pointed out that Bell Pottinger can still work in South Africa.

The ConversationBut PR depends on the ability to win client accounts – by convincing them that you will protect and enhance their reputation. It is difficult to see how an organisation which has effectively trashed its own reputation can protect someone else’s.

Paula Keaveney, Senior Lecturer in Public Relations and Politics, Edge Hill University

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Cyril Ramaphosa's leaked emails: echoes of apartheid-era dirty tricks




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South African Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa.
GCIS
A routine smear. This is the view of the overwhelming majority of commentators and analysts about last weekend’s “revelations” in the Sunday Independent that Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa was a serial womaniser.

The commentariat can expect more such smears. They will come against more than one candidate running for the presidency of the governing ANC - and subsequently of the country. It’s not hard to predict that this slapstick routine will continue all the way to voting at the ANC’s national conference in December.

This was at least the second anti-Ramaphosa smear, following an earlier damp squib that alleged that he abused his ex-wife, a claim she firmly refuted.

Ramaphosa has alleged that rogue elements in the country’s intelligence services hacked into his private emails and doctored them before handing them to the newspaper to smear him. This, he said, was intended to scupper his campaign to become president of the governing ANC and the country. He predicted that it would get worse ahead of the governing party’s elective conference.

Ramaphosa is in a virtual two-horse race with former head of the African Union, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, for the presidency of the ANC. Her former husband President Jacob Zuma has endorsed her as his preferred successor.

ANC Secretary General Gwede Mantashe has since urged factions within the governing party to desist from using state resources to discredit those competing for the presidency.

Then and now


Several dimensions of this are worth unpacking.

Police states, unlike democracies, by definition abuse their secret services to spy on peaceful, lawful opponents. But to find a case where the secret services are also abused to spy on factions and rivals within the governing party, one has to go back all the way to the 1960s.

General Hendrik van den Bergh, who set up the Bureau for State Security (BOSS), to spy on the apartheid regime’s leftist and liberal opponents, also founded the Republikeinse Intelligensie Diens to spy on the then governing National Party’s right-wing faction. These verkramptes (conservatives) broke away in 1969 to form the Herstigte Nasionale Party.

It’s painful to make comparisons between the apartheid police state and post-apartheid South Africa’s Westminster-style democracy. But secret service abuse of phone tapping and letter opening leaves analysts no choice.

While it’s now over a decade since a horrified former Intelligence minister Ronnie Kasrils discovered that some of his subordinates and phone tappers in the National Intelligence Service (NIS) strayed beyond their brief. They took opposite sides in the acrimonious split between President Thabo Mbeki and his fired deputy Jacob Zuma.

What we now seem to have again are rival cliques within the State Security Agency. Each clique sucks up to a rival politician. One clique made available a selection of Ramaphosa’s emails for others to doctor and leak to the Sunday Independent. Another, different clique, was presumably involved in the earlier Gupta email cache. The “#Guptaleaks” exposed the extent of the alleged corrupt relationship between the powerful Gupta family and state officials, parastatals, as well as its influence on Zuma’s government.

A second dimension of the latest smear against Ramaphosa is equally fascinating. The smear organisers, no doubt after some debate between themselves, made the deliberate choice that their smear should be leaked to the Sunday Independent – instead of to The New Age and ANN7. The later was established by Zuma’s friends, the Guptas. With their television station, The New Age are at the heart of state capture allegations and rabidly pro-Zuma and his faction.

This must reflect the spooks’ considered judgement that The New Age and ANN7 are so completely tainted as Gupta business outlets as to be discredited. So, their smear’s only chances of credibility lay with placing their bait in some alternative media go-between. It does help that Steven Motale, the editor of the Sunday Independent, who wrote the story on the leaked emails, is also perceived to be in the pro-Zuma camp, having written an impassioned open letter in 2015 expressing his regret that he was part of a “sinister” campaign against the president.

Motale also praised ordinary members of the ANC members who “consistently supported Zuma despite the sustained barrage of propaganda against him”. He followed it with another this year in which he condemns former Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan as being an impediment to Zuma’s idea of radical economic transformation.

Presumably this leaking and smearing will continue. There will always be one media outlet desperate enough for an exclusive scoop from the secret services. That, also, has not changed since the apartheid decades. Remember The Star newspaper alleging that thorn in the apartheid government’s side, Joe Slovo, who was general secretary of the South African Communist Party during the liberation struggle, killed his activist wife Ruth First? That was of course a total fabrication by the apartheid regime’s agents.

Here in 2017 though, democracy relies on a politically savvy public of informed voters who will respond to smears not with credulity, but amusement, cartoons, and sarcasm.

Campaigns, slates and splits


The remaining months of the formal ANC election campaign between now and the party’s national elective conference in December recall to mind Helen Zille’s comment when she suddenly sprung her surprise resignation as national leader of the main opposition Democratic Alliance (DA). She commented that any internal DA campaigning longer than a few brief weeks would harm her party.

By contrast, ANC internal campaigning resembles primary years in the United States, stretching over pretty much at least 12 months. The ANC needs to develop mechanisms to manage this without splits - such as those that led to the formation of the United Democratic Movement, the Congress of the People, and Economic Freedom Fighters - in its past.

“Slates” have plagued ANC politics during its 2007 and 2012 conferences. With the slate system, delegates to the national conferences are lobbied to vote for a prescribed list (or slate) of candidates linked to a specific presidential candidate. Such a list then automatically becomes the party’s highest decision making body, its national executive committee.

The ConversationOne solution is for the ANC to change its voting procedures for its national and provincial executive committees. This will ensure that the maximum number of candidates any delegate may vote for should be significantly less than the number of seats contested. This would ensure that while the winning slate still wins, the losing slate gets some representation. So it is neither purged nor splits off to form yet another breakaway party.

Keith Gottschalk, Political Scientist, University of the Western Cape

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Dead dogs, dirty nappies, old food: rubbish piles up in Marikana - PHOTOS

City says land is private and it therefore cannot provide a refuse service

Text by Denise Patterson. Photos by Ashraf Hendricks.
6 September 2017
Photo of youth walking passed rubbish
A youth walks passed rubbish in Sheffield road in Philippi East.
Trash has been piling up for years in Marikana informal settlement in Philippi, but the City of Cape Town says rubbish collection services cannot be provided.

When GroundUp visited the settlement on Tuesday, children were playing near the rubbish strewn on the paths between the shacks. In some places rubbish was piled up in informal dump sites, with disposable nappies, used sanitary towels, old food, dead chickens, shoes, clothes, and even a dead dog.
A stray dog walks past rubbish in Sheffield Road. Although some of the trash is easily accessible, rubbish services have not been provided.
Resident Nokuphiwa Kuma, said she and others had sent several letters and made many phone calls to the City of Cape Town about the rubbish but nothing had been done. “I am tired of calling for help but not getting it,” Kuma said. She said she would no longer try to contact the City “because they clearly don’t care about the people and more importantly the children here.”
“We just have to save ourselves”, said Kuma.
A dog finds a piece of meat in the trash and runs off, followed by his comrade.
Mayoral Committee Member for Informal Settlements, Water and Waste Services and Energy, Xanthea Limberg, confirmed that rubbish collection services were not being provided.

“The City has historically been unable to provide refuse collection/cleansing services on this land as it is situated on privately owned land and was subject to a court case. Ad hoc removal of dumped material at the edges of the settlement, where accessible, has been taking place since the settlement formed. Due process in terms of legal proceedings must be followed before basic services can be provided,” she said.

“Should residents want to initiate another community-led clean-up of the area, the City will be able to provide bags and dispose of the refuse once they have collected it”.

In May the City cleared the informal dumps after residents and the Social Justice Coalition cleaned up the area.
Several areas inside the informal settlement are used as dumps. Children play nearby them.
In a landmark judgment last week, the Western Cape High Court ordered the City to negotiate with the owners of the land on which the informal settlement is located with a view to purchase.
Meanwhile residents in the community are afraid for their health from constantly being exposed to debris and foul smells from the dump sites.

Twenty-eight-year-old Ziyenda Daniso, said she worried about the health of her two-year-old, Onele, whom she has found eating the rubbish.

Resident Bonyiwe Khedomo said children played in the rubbish because there were no clean places for them to play. With rubbish right outside the shacks there was no way to keep children away from it except by keeping them indoors all the time, she said. “Sometimes before we notice, our children have already got into the rubbish eating it. We don’t know until our children fall sick and friends tell us what happened.”

Khedomo also said that if the City could supply bags or containers for residents’ rubbish, diseases and infections would not spread.
Residents say that trash in this particular area has been lying here for months.
Children play outside the toilets which is next to a dump. Residents claim children are getting ill because of the trash.
A dog wanders about a dump.
A man collects trash in Protea road, another rubbish dump inside Marikana.
Rubbish piles up next to a set of toilets.

Published originally on GroundUp .

We’re unfairly treated, says Bathabile Dlamini

Minister tells MPs to stop criticising SASSA officials

By Barbara Maregele
6 September 2017
Photo of Bathabile Dlamini
Social Development Minister Bathabile Dlamini says she has been unfairly treated by MPs. Archive photo: Ashraf Hendricks
Social Development Minister Bathabile Dlamini has accused MPs of “unfair treatment” and of “criticising” officials over progress in setting up a new social grants payment system.
“We really feel that we are being unfairly treated because we have tried to clean our house and are trying our best,” she said.

Dlamini and representatives of the South African Social Security Agency (SASSA) and the Department of Social Development were giving a progress report to Parliament’s social development portfolio committee on Wednesday. At the meeting SASSA announced that it could award the SA Post Office (SAPO) a contract to distribute grants from April 2018 by next Wednesday. But it was still not clear what SAPO’s exact role would be.

“I should mention that it was the ruling party that decided that the Post Office must be involved in the work of SASSA. We understand the nature of the work we are doing and need to ensure that they really have what is needed to pay grants. It has nothing to do with us not wanting to work with the Post Office,” she said.

Dlamini’s comments follow a late night meeting with Parliament’s Standing Committee on Public Accounts (Scopa) on Tuesday. Scopa MPs have previously raised concerns that SASSA’s plan to sign up other contractors as well as the Post Office could result in the current contractor, Cash Paymaster Services (CPS), continuing to provide services.

Before proceedings began on Wednesday, Dlamini told MPs that she was concerned with Scopa’s “compromising” questions to officials. “We want whoever thinks grant payment is important to work with us and not create confusion for officials. Yesterday in Scopa we were asked to disclose very confidential information which is unfair. We are being compromised in the name of doing justice,” she said.

Several MPs also questioned the oversight roles of the two parliamentary committees. Chairperson Rosemary Capa said that Scopa’s briefing should not take priority over that of her committee. She said she would ask for legal advice on the scope of the oversight role of both committees.
Since the Constitutional Court ruling in March which extended SASSA’s five-year contract with CPS until March 2018, SASSA has been giving quarterly reports to the Court on its progress towards taking over the payment of social grants.

The Court reinstated its supervisory role after SASSA failed to meet its own deadline to take over the payment of social grants. SASSA plans to “phase out” CPS and have a new contractor by 1 April 2018 and to take over the payments itself by 2021.

Dlamini suggested a meeting next Thursday to update MPs on SAPO’s role, before handing in the progress report to Court. “After the due diligence report is done, we should be given the opportunity to come back with SAPO and let them respond to the issues,” she said.

In her report, SASSA acting CEO Pearl Bhengu said the panel of experts appointed by the Court to assist the agency was charging R2,700 per hour instead of their offer of R1,500 per hour. Bhengu could not say how many hours the experts had worked so far despite concerns raised by MPs that their appointment could already be “over budget”.

Bhengu said the next progress reports to the Constitutional Court were due on 15 September and 15 December. SASSA expected to test the new payment system in January next year, Bhengu said. She assured MPs SASSA was “committed to sticking to the timelines” and 10.2 million new cards would be issued to beneficiaries within the next six months. Bhengu said SASSA was still in talks with the Reserve Bank to create special accounts for beneficiaries. She said no debit deductions would be allowed on the new accounts.

Green Cards

A number of MPs also questioned SASSA on how it would help grant recipients “get out” of their EasyPay Everywhere accounts or “green” cards.

EasyPay is the sister company of CPS, which distributes the 17.3 million social grants. Both companies are owned by Net1. EasyPay issues green cards and funeral policies with another Net1 company, SmartLife, to social grant recipients who apply for loans from Moneyline, also a Net1 company.

“We get complaints by people in townships all the time that are happy to take the loans, but then complain after they have all these deductions,” ANC MP Beverley Abrahams said.

In response, Dlamini said she had written to Grindrod Bank, where the EasyPay accounts are held, and to Net1 to “ask them to stop issuing the green cards to beneficiaries”. “There was never an agreement with them about these cards or the machines they introduced where people have to withdraw their money,” she said.

Published originally on GroundUp .

Matatiele: “It’s time government shows us they do care”

Premier given two weeks to fix roads

By Nombulelo Damba-Hendrik
7 September 2017
Photo of gravel road
Matatiele residents have given the provincial Premier two weeks to respond to their demands for tarred roads. Photo: Manqulo Nyakombi
Community leaders in Matatiele have suspended protests for two weeks to give Eastern Cape Premier Phumulo Masualle time to come up with answers to their demands. But protesters say they have little faith that the Premier will do so.

Residents have been protesting since last month, demanding that dirt roads in the area be tarred. They say ambulances and police vans are struggling to get to their villages because of bad roads.

During the protests all dirt roads between Matatiele and Maluti, including the one between the town and the Lesotho border, were closed with burning tyres and big rocks. Several cars were stoned and 12 people were arrested for public violence. Schools were disrupted and police advised business owners to close their shops last week Wednesday.

Protests were suspended last Thursday after community members had a meeting with Masualle, Alfred Nzo district municipal officials, Matatiele local municipality officials and traditional leaders.
This week community chairperson Nhlahla Ntsoti said that the situation in Matatiele was still tense. “This is not over, but we want to give the Premier a chance to come up with a solution and if he fails we will go back on our dirt roads to protest,” he said.

He said residents were still gathering and were ready to start a protest anytime. “Today we stopped a group of protesters who were fed up with empty promises. They said they want to wait for Masualle on the road,” he said. “It is time government shows us that they do care.”

Resident Thapelo Mokoena said community members did not trust Masualle to solve the problem.
“We are tired of being fed empty promises. Last year we were told that the roads would be fixed, but that never happened. Again early this year we protested, but there was no solution. This time we are not going to back down,” he said.

Eastern Cape Department of Public Works spokesperson Phumzile Zuzile said the MEC of Public Works, Thandiswa Marawu, had written to the Minister of Public Works Nkosinathi Nhleko asking for the dirt road between Matatiele and the Lesotho border to be rebuilt by Sanral. They were waiting for the minister’s response to matter.

He said the department would continue to maintain the dirt roads in Matatiele.

Published originally on GroundUp .