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Last week, NGO strategist and former newspaper editor Chris Roper took to the pages of a well-known business publication to bemoan the continued loss of support for the mainstream to what he calls "indie info providers" such as podcasters, news personalities, and independent platforms like this one. He took the time to offer a few prescriptions for reversing the trend.

What moved Roper to pen this missive, other than the opportunity to launder a few talking points from his NGO's latest report on the subject, was an article by reporter and analyst Kenneth Kgwadi entitled Focus on Africa, Not Palestine. The piece was published online by the Sunday Times, although, oddly, not in the print edition. It appears to have struck a nerve, attracting more than 100 000 views on the social media platform, X.

Roper was clearly offended by the article, describing it as "clumsy Israeli propaganda". Yet rather than focusing on the substance of the argument, he highlighted the fact that Kgwadi is a research fellow at the "pro-Israel think tank" Middle East Africa Research Institute and that he completed a master's degree at Ben-Gurion University in Israel.

As the director of said think tank, I can attest that this sort of response is fairly common whenever we publish anything on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that contradicts what you might find in the Luthuli House monthly newsletter. Kenneth certainly does not need me to defend his writing. His work appears regularly across a range of media outlets and has even received recognition from Roper's own former newspaper.

What is interesting about Roper's article is that, in the process of offering prescriptions for saving the mainstream media, he provides a textbook example of the very behaviour that helped drive audiences away from it in the first place.

Sin

It seems Kgwadi's article commits the apparent sin of recognising Thomas Sowell's observation that in public policy there are no solutions, only trade-offs. His argument is straightforward, yet apparently controversial: South Africa's decision to align itself with some of the most extreme and violent elements in Palestinian society is damaging to the country's national interests both locally and internationally.

More importantly, the time, energy, and diplomatic capital expended defending organisations such as Hamas would be better directed toward addressing the activities of their ideological cousins, who are proliferating across Africa at an alarming rate, including in our own backyard.

Roper dismisses this analysis as "whataboutism". What he ignores is that Kgwadi lives what he writes. He built his reputation not through commentary on the Middle East but through reporting on African issues, particularly in the rural areas of South Africa. His work focuses on service delivery failures, municipal corruption, and the many overlapping crises affecting neglected communities. In many of the places Kgwadi reports on, access to clean water remains a daily struggle. People are forced to share water sources with livestock, and preventable illnesses caused by contaminated water remain common. Water also happens to be the focus of the master's degree from Ben-Gurion University that Roper thinks is proper to deride.

The African National Congress government has made it abundantly clear that cooperation with Israel, even on matters as basic as water provision, is viewed as a diplomatic transgression. Yet it is an Israeli company that helped restore access to a water source in North West that had become inaccessible to nearly half a million people thanks to that government’s neglect.

Kgwadi, whose reporting focuses on the forgotten parts of South Africa, the very places we are endlessly told suffer from "news deserts" because mainstream media lacks the resources to cover them, has correctly concluded that the trade-off between supporting Hamas and having access to water is not worth making.

Another Story

Roper also takes issue with another of Kgwadi's stories, this time concerning the University of Cape Town (UCT). His complaint centres on reporting that highlighted the potential loss of funding arising from UCT council’s decision to adopt resolutions relating to Gaza.

For drawing attention to this possibility, Roper accuses Kgwadi of engaging in "emotional blackmail". Yet alerting the public to the likely consequences of poor decision-making is precisely the role of the media in a free society. When a train is hurtling toward a vehicle stranded on the tracks, sounding the alarm is not blackmail. It is an attempt to prevent a derailment, in this case, of the UCT academic project.

Indeed, the train-wreck analogy has become increasingly apt.

This week, UCT Vice-Chancellor Professor Mosa Moshabela told Parliament's Portfolio Committee on Higher Education that the university had already lost approximately R250 million as a consequence of the resolutions. Even that figure is conservative, as it relates only to private funding. The university itself has estimated that losses associated with international academic partnerships and exchanges could be several times higher. Of the funding already lost, approximately R15 million annually was earmarked for bursaries supporting more than 100 of the most disadvantaged students on campus.

Let us be clear: this is not a free speech issue. UCT had numerous avenues available to express its views on the Israel-Hamas conflict. What it chose to do was adopt a course of action that violated commitments it had voluntarily adopted with donors and academic partners regarding academic freedom. The resulting financial consequences were contractual, not political.

The governance failures have been so severe that members of the university's own academic community have taken the institution to court, while a UCT council member faces litigation from her own philanthropic foundation over the issue. Perhaps it is no coincidence that UCT has just lost its position as Africa's top-ranked university in the Center for World University Rankings after holding it for a decade, a development greeted with considerable enthusiasm by Wits alumni across social media.

None of this appears in Roper's article, nor would one reasonably expect it to. The facts are not only ideologically inconvenient; they have also received remarkably little attention from much of the mainstream media. For doing the sort of writing that other journalists are supposed to do, Kgwadi is branded a "useless idiot" by Roper, who also makes the barely concealed suggestion that respectable publications should think twice before publishing his work.

The contrast is striking.

A middle-aged man in Cape Town, backed by millions of euros and dollars in NGO donor funding, is using that influence to delegitimise and suppress the views of a young reporter from rural South Africa because he dislikes his conclusions. Worse still, those without access to clean water and those on the bottom rung of the tertiary education ladder are told that their interests must take second place to his luxury opinions.

If that is what the mainstream media has become, it is hardly surprising that so many people are walking away from it.