BRUCE'S LIST: ANC cooks up Twitter plot, gets egg on its face

Bruce’s List: A guide to informed reads.

Oooh, I just love this story. It has made my day. As my name and Ferial Haffajee’s and Johann Rupert’s and Alec Hogg’s get drawn into a dirty little Twitter plot by the Zuptas (I need to find a way to work Salim Essa’s name into that — he is much more central to state capture than we give him credit for) to insult us, it turns out that not only is the White House being advised now by a social media manipulator (Steve Bannon) and not only did the Russians tweak the US presidential elections Donald Trump’s way, but our very own ANC tried the same thing in last year’s local government elections. And, given the ANC’s inability to do just about anything properly, a secret plot it hatched to plant fake news from a fake site failed (see the results) but the aftermath is proving particularly nasty. You have to read this — it is littered with the names of ANC social media darlings, heavies and butterflies. Inevitably, an ANC plot cooked up in the offices of (and with the evident help of) the country’s largest advertising agency, Ogilvy & Mather to plaster posters of Julius Malema holding a rifle, start a new “news” online publication and have radio shows swamped by people spouting a chosen ANC line of the day not only failed but has ended up in court. You gotta love this stuff.

Let’s hope that next time the darlings in the advertising industry give themselves one of those big and expensive bashes where they give each other prizes, they don’t forget Ogilvy & Mather’s cringing-making attempts to introduce lies into our South African public discourse. Corkscrew of the Year award, I’d call it, in honour of the British colonial army officer in India who became so irritated with the complexities of Lord Mountbatten’s strategies he said to him “Dickie you’re the only man I know who could swallow a nail and shit a corkscrew.”

I find it harder than some of my colleagues in the media to get worked up about the trashy and unsophisticated rubbish the Gupta Twitter army puts on Twitter about me. I’m not shamed, or embarrassed or even angry. I know what they are doing in and to our country and so do a lot of other people and I won’t stop writing about it until one of them shoots me. At some stage, who knows, that may even become worth it, so watch this space. My point isn’t to try to be a hero. Investigative journalists, rather than mere commentators like myself, operate daily in far more perilous territory than I ever will. Their job (including uncovering, researching, checking and, finally, telling, the story above) is way out of my league and we owe them a debt of gratitude every day in this country. Anyway, I’m not so much hurt by the Gupta trolls but interested in how they do it. Are these real people or things that you can somehow just create and command? I found the answers in here and it is just fascinating, a joint effort, it seems, from the Daily Maverick team, which also deserves our thanks.

Of course, as the Zupta (Zuptessa?) machine bears down on finance minister Pravin Gordhan again, the poor man has to put together a budget for next month that keeps us inside investment states. Because government (and Gordhan is its banker, not its economic planner) is so bad at running the economy and so incapable of putting in place policies that will actually create growth, and has got us into such debt we now borrow in the markets to pay welfare and (deliberately Zuma-bloated) public sector salaries, Gordhan is going to sharply raise taxes next month. Thanks a lot, JZ. Here’s Business Day’s front page lead today. 

There’s a lot going on in the world, and I’ll be sure to keep up with it. The Trump administration, such as it is, seems already to be threatening China for building up, and then militarising, atolls in the South China Sea. Hell, let’s have a war then, why not? In Britain, Prime Minister Theresa May has pushed an industrial blueprint for a post-Brexit Britain, a document culled from 50 years ago. But let me start and finish today in SA, with what might be a looming industrial cock-up of significant proportions. When Brian Molefe was still CEO of Transnet, he oversaw a huge locomotive order which drew in US, Canadian and Chinese manufacturers. The R50bn deal would create a new locomotive manufacturing industry in SA as offsets came into play. The whole thing was just thrilling. That is until the first Chinese locomotives were put on a tangent line and started up. To put it bluntly, they don’t work. They’re not too tall this time. This time, apparently, the alternators wobble. I have no idea what that means but a shaking alternator in a locomotive is obviously enough to get an experienced train driver to quietly stop, get out of his machine and walk away. Thanks Brian ...