2011: Year of the news overload
- Verashni Pillay
- Dec 6, 2011
Verashni Pillay tries to make sense of a news-packed year.
1. A newsmaker named Juju
Love him or - more probably - hate him, you have to accept that when it comes to making the news, our country's most notorious youth leader has it down to a fine art. If it wasn't calling white people criminals in the lead up to the local elections, it was various disciplinary tangles with the youth league's mother body, the ANC. But things went south for Juju, as he is affectionately known, when newspaper City Press uncovered what many had long suspected: a sophisticated system of tender corruption devised by Malema and his pals and entrenched into the Limpopo government systems. But, funnily enough, this was not the catalyst for the biggest threat to Malema's career so far: instead his lobbying to remove President Jacob Zuma has seen the latter turn on his one-time number one supporter in the hopes of retaining a second term at the do-or-die ANC elective conference in 2012. Malema now faces a five-year suspension from the ANC for sowing division and bringing the party into disrepute.
2. Drama at the Constitutional Court
The appointment of Mogoeng Mogoeng in September was the controversial conclusion of months of drama at the highest court of the land. The Constitutional Court saw its biggest test of the separation of powers principle as Zuma tried to push his preferred candidate, Sandile Ngcobo, into what experts argued was an unconstitutional extension of the Chief Justice's term of office. Amid court challenges to the move, Ngcobo - a worthy leader but tainted with Zuma's approval - stepped down. His sudden departure made for a leadership vacuum, with the obvious candidate for the position, Deputy Chief Justice Dikgang Moseneke, again overlooked by Zuma, with whom he has had differences in the past. While rumours raged that other candidates turned down the appointment in deference to Moseneke, Zuma caused a storm of angered reaction by nominating and later appointing Mogoeng. This despite a series of submissions and newspaper exposés about his unsuitability as a candidate, pointing to a dearth of published work, and a series of rulings that seemed to favour perpetrators in rape and child molestation cases. Questions have also arisen about what appears to be homophobic views, all of which Mogoeng, who now heads up one of the branches of our government, vociferously denies. Now Mogoeng has come under pressure to act against Judge President John Hlophe, the man who allegedly lobbied Constitutional Court judges to be biased in favour of then embattled ANC deputy president Jacob Zuma.
3. Election fever 2011
South Africans proved themselves to be a nation of procrastinators who couldn't help but still care about local politics, when they turned out in surprisingly high numbers for the local municipal elections in 2011. The lead up to the poll was uglier than usual, as the race intensified between the ruling ANC and the opposition DA. The DA emerged "victorious" with a whopping 23% of the vote, up from 16% in the previous election. It made many people gleeful about stronger opposition emerging, but it meant the decimation of a host of small parties: IFP, ID and UDM, to name a few. The ANC meanwhile remained at a comfortable 62%, but were hounded for losing voters in every province with the exception of Kwa-ZuluNatal where it captured votes from former IFP voters. Meanwhile, with just 5% of their voters being black, the DA must work harder to win broad-based support.
4. An Arab spring
It started in Tunisia in late 2010 and by early 2011, it spread like wildfire to other Arab nations: ordinary people rising up and demanding democracy from dictators who had been in power for decades: Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain and, of course Libya. Other Arab countries like Algeria, Jordan and Morocco also felt the heat, with copycat protests coalescing on a 'day of rage'. The revolutions made for varying degrees of success, the most startling of which was seeing Egypt Hosni Mubarak wheeled into a Cairo court on a hospital bed inside a giant cage, to be tried for his crimes after 30 years of repressive rule. The most notable facet of the uprisings was the heavy reliance on social media platforms as organising tools. The revolution was not only televised, it was tweeted and Facebooked too, despite some governments' best attempts to shut down access to these platforms.
5. The world number one terrorist
It was a lazy public holiday here in South Africa when we heard the news: the US's most sort-after terrorist had been found and killed, nearly ten years after he took responsibility for the game-changing September 11 terrorist attacks. Osama Bin Laden was found by US troops and CIA operatives in a comfortable compound in Pakistan, putting the country in an awkward position. Meanwhile US president Barack Obama emerged a hero in an otherwise tough year as he delivered on one of his pre-election promises.
6. DSK's media circus
The arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and a potential presidential candidate for France, for sexually assaulting a maid at a Manhattan hotel on May 15 made instant headlines and stayed there for a good while, while he remained under house arrest. However after completing a lengthy investigation, prosecutors succeeded in getting all charges against Strauss-Kahn dropped, thanks to the woman's alleged dubious credibility as a witness and inconclusive physical evidence. We'll never know if DSK, as he is known, was the victim of a smear campaign, as his supporters claim. But with the potent ingredients of sex, politics and money in the mix, the incident was always going to turn into a media circus. During the first ten days of the scandal, 'DSK' appeared on the front page of more than 150 000 newspapers around the world, an analysis firm found. Now new questions have been raised about the incident, seeming to suggest that DSK was set up.
7. The scandal to end all others
After decades of publishing tabloid sleaze and celebrity sex gossip, it took an even juicier scandal to shut down one of the world's biggest English newspapers: News of the World (NOTW). The phone-hacking scandal by the 168-year old paper saw reporters accessing the voicemail of a murdered British teenager, using an insider private investigator. The scandal deepened when the paper was alleged to have hacked into the phones of families of British service personnel killed in action. The world watched as senior personnel were brought to book, and powerful media mogul Rupert Murdoch interrogated by British parliament on the scandal. The paper shut down in July.
8. Two Related Terrorist Attacks Shock Norway (July 22)
The country renowned for its openness was shocked when one of its own citizens embarked on a killing spree that killed 77 people. Anders Breivik became a household name when he owned up to the two co-ordinated attacks, confounding earlier speculation that it was a terrorist attack by an extremist Muslim. The first attack was a car bomb near a government building that killed eight people and the second a gruesome mass-shooting at a youth summer camp that saw 66, mostly young, people killed. Breivik apparently prepared for the attacks for years, putting together a 1500-word manifesto outlining his views against Islam and immigration. He proved, if nothing else, that terrorists can be blonde and Christian too.
9. The earthquake that rocked our world
Japan saw its toughest crisis since the end of the second World War, with a March earthquake and tsunami that devastated its economy and displaced hundreds of thousands of people. The 2011 Tōhoku earthquake was one of the five most powerful earthquakes in the world overall since modern record-keeping began in 1900, which triggered vicious tsunami waves of up to 40.5 metres. The scale of the disaster shocked the world. Nearly 15 774 people were killed and 300 000 displaced while millions of dollars of aid poured into the country. But the most frightening part was the series of nuclear accidents the earthquake caused. Meltdowns at the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant complex affected hundreds of thousands of residents, who were evacuated. The overall cost of the catastrophe could exceed US$300 billion, making it the most expensive natural disaster on record. Meanwhile, the earthquake shifted the Earth on its axis by estimates of between 10 cm and 25 cm, meaning this was one disaster that literally did move our world.
