I have read the Sunday Times (the South African edition) for many years despite the fact that it has become thinner and less interesting. Basically, there is now very little news in the paper. It is mainly opinion, celebrity, the often embarrassing local fashion scene, plus some sport. It is a paper in steep decline.

I am told that the newspaper’s management is bent on “transformation”. I’m not sure what that means in newspaper terms. But then the Sunday Times featured an article by an Israel-hater arguing that Roedean school had been quite right to adopt an antisemitic stance and should have maintained it. I could imagine how all previous editors of the paper would have refused to carry such an article. Is that what is meant by transformation?

I suppose that inserting straightforwardly antisemitic propaganda into what used to be a good investigative paper is transformation of a sort, but it certainly doesn’t appeal to me, and it would have shocked the historic African National Congress (ANC). Just think of the plethora of leading Jewish figures in that movement – Solly Sachs, Joe Slovo, Ruth First, Michael Harmel, Harold Wolpe, Arthur Goldreich, and many more.

Nelson Mandela, for his part, was always scrupulously concerned to maintain a balanced attitude between Israel and its critics and was deeply appreciative of the strong Jewish participation in the anti-apartheid struggle. But, of course, the ANC too has fallen on evil times and now happily embraces antisemitic movements such as Hamas and Hezbollah.

I was, nonetheless, a little shocked when the Sunday Times suddenly stopped arriving at our house. It turned out that my subscription had expired. In the old days I would have got a warning that it was due to expire so that I could renew it in time but now this practice has apparently fallen away. This suggests that the newspaper no longer much cares whether people renew their subscriptions or not.

After some internal debate I decided I would renew my subscription. I went online and tried to do so but it was hopeless. The website was one of those circular hunt-the-slipper affairs where you think you are getting somewhere but then you are re-directed back to where you started. After 40 minutes of trying, I gave up. I then phoned the Sunday Times and said I wanted to re-subscribe. They told me I must go to their website. I explained that I’d done that but that it just didn’t work.

I was surprised since I assumed that all newspapers were subscription-hungry and surely it must have come to their notice by now that their website made it impossible for anyone to subscribe? Apparently not.

Extraordinary Situation

I happened to mention this rather extraordinary situation to a prominent journalist friend who has had a long career with what is now Arena Publications, publishers of the Sunday Times and Business Day. He seemed quite disturbed to hear that it was impossible to subscribe to the Sunday Times, which is, after all, still South Africa’s largest circulation paper, and kindly said he would have a word with the paper’s management about this. The result of his initiative was that I got an email from a lady at the Sunday Times who said she would call and assist me to subscribe.

She duly called and got me to call up the Sunday Times online website on my computer. It quickly became clear that the website she was looking at and the one I could see on my screen were not the same. She would tell me to go to various commands which were on her screen but not on mine. After a while she seemed to lose patience with this and simply told me to go to Subscriptions, which I did. This then behaved just as it had before, with a circular chase which never ended. I simply could not subscribe. After 40 minutes of trying the lady gave up, sounding very defeated, and said she would have to contact “technical guys” at the Sunday Times.

After waiting a few days, I contacted this lady again and asked her if she was in a position to help me now. She cheerfully emailed back saying she would call me after the weekend. But she didn’t. I sent her another email saying I was still hoping for her call. To this and later queries I got no reply.

Since this whole initiative had only taken place thanks to my journalist friend’s intervention I felt I had better tell him what had happened. So, I sent him an email relating what had occurred. To my astonishment I then received an email from Arena Publications saying they had intercepted my email to him and that I could not contact him.

This seemed like the most extraordinary sort of Big Brother intervention and I wondered whether my friend realised that his email was being monitored and intercepted. So I wrote him another email to tell him so, but this merely produced another Big Brother message from Arena saying my email had been intercepted. It was clear I could no longer communicate with my friend. Meanwhile I tried several more times to contact the lady at the Sunday Times but without success. Now six months have elapsed, and I have realised that I must give up all hope of subscribing to the Sunday Times.

Like a Government Department

What’s weird is that the experience is like trying to deal with a South African government department. Anyone who’s tried that can tell you how maddeningly inefficient and incompetent it is. There is the same non-working website, the difficulty in getting any help, the failed promises to return your calls, the attempt to push responsibility towards other parties within the department, and so on.

I see that Arena is actually owned by Harith, a black economic empowerment (BEE) outfit that was birthed by the Public Investment Corporation, so perhaps that explains it – Harith seems to operate just as hopelessly as if it was a South African government department because it still bears the marks and culture of its origins.

I then remembered that for a long and unexplained period the late Pravin Gordhan had tried to sell off South African Airways (SAA) to Harith. It was clearly a sweetheart deal – no bids were entertained from anyone else and there was a complete cloud of mystery over how or why Harith had been chosen.

In the end the deal collapsed with nothing ever being explained. The impression given was that Gordhan was keen to keep SAA as a state-owned entity and that Harith, while not exactly state-owned, was at least a sort of halfway house so SAA could continue to be held within the family, as it were.

I then read that Harith is buying FlySafair, which accounts for 60% of all South Africa’s domestic air traffic. This made a certain sort of sense. Some BEE outfits seem to suffer from an acute form of status anxiety.

In comparison with well-established old “white” companies they are all Johnny-come-latelies, after all. So they sometimes seek to alleviate this anxiety by attempting to purchase high-profile concerns that are or were household names, although this may not make commercial sense.

Right Mind

After all, why would anyone in their right mind want to buy SAA? Both the airline and its reputation have been utterly trashed. It was once Africa’s leading airline but it has been reduced to a tiny size, which means it cannot again hope to be competitive, as it once used to be – not just with Ethiopian Airlines or Royal Air Maroc (the new African leaders), but with British Airways, Lufthansa, or Air France. But there may be BEE types who would feel their status was enhanced by owning what was once the national carrier.

Or, indeed, by owning the Sunday Times or Business Day. These too are reassuringly household names – though again, buying them makes no business sense. Everyone knows that printed newspapers are a dying industry. The shrinkage and decline of those two titles is painfully obvious and all the action is now with online-only news websites.

As for Harith buying Flyafair, I would be deeply dubious. South African airlines have a high mortality rate. It is a tough business with very thin margins. In order to survive and flourish you need to be extremely efficient, punctual, and cost-conscious. If my experience with the Arena Publications part of the Harith empire is anything to go by, these are not virtues that Harith shares. Indeed, if my experience is at all typical of how Harith works, I shall be giving a wide berth to FlySafair in future…

But there is a more basic point. None of our newspapers today is a patch on, say, the Rand DailyMail of the 1960s and 1970s. And the internet news websites have failed to fill the gap. So, we are in absolute terms less well informed than we would have been fifty or more years ago.

This is pretty discouraging: despite, or possibly because of, all the technological progress of that period, we are in absolute terms worse served now. Similarly, none of today’s airlines have really maintained the standards of stable, long-term good service provided by SAA and Comair at their peak. Nowadays airlines come and go, and it is quite difficult to keep track of this continually changing reality. The swallows I know now speak enthusiastically of Kenya Airways and Norse Atlantic Airways, both good quality low-fare alternatives.

Indeed, one of my swallow friends said “You know, Kenya Airways is entirely run by Africans, from the pilots to the flight attendants. It’s cheap, efficient and its service is excellent. Why can’t South Africa manage something like that?” Why indeed?