Former student activist Mcebo Dlamini once said: “SA is a movie. We will be in a drama, a series. Everyday you will be shocked by something new.”
The story of the prison escape of convicted rapist and murder Thabo Bester is surely the latest episode in this season of the tragic drama that SA has become.
On March 15, GroundUp, a not-for-profit news agency, first broke the story that Bester, who was serving a life sentence in a private jail in Mangaung, Free State, had escaped in May 2022.
The story told by the prison authorities, both the private owners of the prison and the state authorities, was that Bester had died in prison by suspected suicide after finding a body, identified as his , burnt beyond recognition. This story went from one sensational detail to another as more details emerged about his alleged accomplice, social media socialite Dr Nandipha Magudumana.
As the pair’s misadventures seem to have come to an end with their arrests in Tanzania, South African remains engrossed and animated by the story. Behind the shock and awe of the Thabo Bester story is a lesson for SA about democracy.
American author Noam Chomksy would caution us all not to allow ourselves to be so distracted by the drama that we fail to think about what this means in the context of a country in crisis. The escape of Bester should not be treated as a telenovela. A point of entertainment far removed from our realities. SA is one of the rape and murder capitals in the world, the escape of a convicted rapist and murderer for almost 10 months without a single word from police or correctional facilities authorities is alarming.
The privatisation of prisons and the effect thereof on the states constitutional mandates regarding incarceration should be in sharp focus. The allegations of money, corruption and political power needed to commit and conceal these crimes for so long should be a source of public outrage. Bester’s escape must necessarily be linked to critical questions about the state of the nation, the functioning of the government and the role of the media as the Fourth Estate.
The media particularly has played a starring role in this saga. While ministers Bheki Cele and Ronald Lamola were almost self-congratulatory at the announcement of the arrest of Bester in Tanzania, had it not been for the team at GroundUp following leads they received from the public, Bester may still be living his best life is a multi-million-rand mansion in Sandton, Johannesburg.
GroundUp is not a large media house with endless resources or a glitzy brand. It is a gritty, non-profit agency that centres on telling the stories of SA from the vantage point of communities, residents, voters and citizens. While other media houses amplified the story, it was GroundUp which found the court records of Magudumana claiming to be Bester’s customary wife to retrieve and cremate the body that was passed off as his . It exposed the details of an autopsy that showed that the burnt body did not match the DNA of Bester’s mother and they first posted a picture, taken by a source in 2022, of Bester and Magudumana at a Woolworths store that rendered the story about the burnt body as Bester’s without credibility.
The GroundUp team has done what the media in a democracy should routinely do; use knowledge to hold power to account. Too often the media is reduced to a conveyor belt of information passed from the most powerful to broader society presumed to be passive and demobilised. In a democracy the media is a legitimised power broker. It must understand how power works and find itself on the right side of history. It must be on the side of justice, empowerment of the disempowered and the expansion of democracy rather than the entrenchment of an elite’s power.
Journalism in a democracy must pursue facts and truth but does not need to purport to be neutral. Because the political is so deeply personal, any claim to political neutrality would be disingenuous. What is more coveted than political neutrality in journalism and media is political honesty that has a politics that leans into giving power to the people.
The tone of the GroundUp reporting on the Bester escape has not only unapologetically asked important questions about the failures of power in both the private sector and government but created space for a broader public conversation that bore down as pressure on police and correctional service authorities to do their jobs. What had not been done in 10 months was accomplished in less than one month after the story broke and public pressure mounted.
As French philosopher Michel Foucault reminds us, what is needed to challenge institutional power is the “insurrection of subjugated knowledge”.
Perhaps galvanising SA’s people’s power is not limited to shutdowns that see millions of protesters in the streets but needs more spaces for the rising voices of disempowered and subjugated people to be valued, elevated and empowered through a Fourth Estate that is firmly of and for the people.
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