Harber’s curious relationship with Pauw
I have tried many times over the years to engage with Anton Harber and point him in the direction of hard evidence that shows, at least with the Cato Manor story, that he has been misled.
The first occasion was in 2017, when he penned an opinion piece for Daily Maverick after I was interviewed on the Eusebius McKaiser show with Jacques Pauw. In his opinion piece, Harber described how Pauw “lambasts the Sunday Times 2011 report that General Johan Booysen was running what was effectively a police hit squad in KwaZulu-Natal”. This story was “particularly embarrassing, as it won the major Taco Kuiper Award for Investigative Journalism (in which I was a judge)”, Harber wrote.
I sent him an email that ended with the following words:
Anton, please take the trouble to look at these facts so that you can see for yourself how wrong your damaging claim is. Again, should you so wish I am more than willing to provide you with supporting evidence for everything we have written.
Stephan
On that occasion, Harber amended his piece (without taking up the offer of evidence).
Then, in 2018, Harber wrote a fawning review for The Conversation Africa of Pauw’s book, The President’s Keepers. I emailed him again, with the following objection: “Towards the end of your review you uncritically endorse Pauw’s completely unsubstantiated smears against me.”
Harber wrote back to say: “I don’t think you can say I accepted his view uncritically. You will know, for example, that I have closely scrutinised and stand by the award given for the Booysen story.”
It was a breathtaking about-turn – just two months earlier he’d branded the story “particularly embarrassing”. This wouldn’t be the first or last flip-flop Harber would make on the subject.
‘You will know, for example, that I have closely scrutinised and stand by the award given for the Booysen story’
Anton Harber
Subsequent attempts to get Harber to engage with whistle blowers for our Cato Manor stories were rebuffed. In March 2019 Harber finally caved in to pressure, much of it exerted by Pauw and Booysen, to withdraw our Taco Kuiper runner-up award. He did so without interviewing any of the writers, without putting any of the allegations to us, or engaging with our evidence or whistle blowers. Wa Afrika and I subsequently wrote to the Taco Kuiper judges and to board members of the Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN), asking for an impartial investigation. All we wanted was an independent panel to consider the evidence of what in our view were obvious human rights abuses. Instead, we were ignored.
In 2020 Harber approached me for comment for his book, So, for the Record. I provided him with detailed responses, many of which were either ignored or distorted. None of our whistle blowers were consulted for his book either. Clearly, Harber had already made up his mind what to write, and wasn’t about to let inconvenient facts get in the way of his main thesis.
Another person with direct knowledge of our Cato Manor coverage who Harber interviewed for his book also told me he felt that his responses were completely ignored. It appears only people such as Jacques Pauw and Johan Booysen could be taken seriously.
A similar point was made by Ferial Haffajee, another journalist with first-hand knowledge of some of the events Harber relates in his book. She described his account as “sloppy” and containing factual errors. “The author only sees heroes in people like himself – Booysen, Pauw, Paul O’Sullivan, etc,” she wrote on Twitter.
Pauw gave the book a ringing endorsement on the cover that perpetuated the smear he and Booysen had fed Harber in the first place. “The most important book about the fourth estate since apartheid,” Pauw gushed. “Harber cuts with a surgeon’s precision to expose the media’s complicity in state capture.” (The factual errors Harber made while recklessly wielding his “surgeon’s” blade are dissected in my response to his book).
‘The author only sees heroes in people like himself – Booysen, Pauw, Paul O’Sullivan, etc,’
Ferial Haffajee, commenting on Anton Harber’s book
With Pauw’s sad fall from grace after video evidence surfaced that he had fabricated the events surrounding an incident at the V&A Waterfront, Harber must have been stunned by the behaviour of someone whose word he had treated as gospel. “I struggle to think of a journalistic disaster more harmful than this one, and we have had quite a few competitors,” was his grim verdict.
I can only hope this incident has given Harber pause to revisit so many of Pauw’s claims that he has uncritically repeated as fact – including his journalistic lies about me.
stephanhofstatter.com 