Put your interests first, at your own peril

IT’S telling when people manipulate their environment to suit only their interests at the expense of all else, and see nothing wrong with doing so.
It’s an understatement to describe as rich, the actions of anglers (and probably not just those at Toti, but all along the South African coastline) who remove and cast aside the toby fish, because ‘they eat our bait’.
So now the fish are hauled out of their environment and killed, for the benefit of anglers whose bait they eat. Bait that is cast into the ocean (their natural and only habitat) and used to entice preferably the ‘right kind of fish’ to snack on.
Next, why don’t we go to Kruger Park and cull the lions because they mess with the ability of hunters to target a specific specimen of buck in hunting season? What nonsense.
Similarly, in the political spectrum, President Jacob Zuma’s comments on Mexico’s ‘patriotic journalism’ – and his expectation for South African media to follow suit – is no doubt self-serving and will surely come back to bite him where it hurts.
Zuma, speaking to aspiring journalists in the form of varsity students, regaled about a trip he took to Mexico as deputy president, recounting how shocked he was to hear about the country’s high crime rate. He says he quizzed his hosts as to why he had never read about the widespread violence, to which they simply replied that their journalists are patriots who wanted the country to succeed, so they steer clear of reporting on the negative.
Surely his call on South Africa’s media to follow suit puts him at odds with our country’s democratic journey?
A Mexican editor, in the wake of Zuma’s comments, has dismissed Zuma’s comments as “not only outrageous lies”, but “insulting” in a subsequent City Press report.
According to him, Mexican media outlets avoid covering crime and violence in their communities not because of a patriotic duty, but because of threats and aggressions against them by criminal organisations that authorities have been unable to stop.
Journalists have taken umbrage at his interpretation of ‘patriotic reporting’ in light of the dozens of murdered Mexican journalists whose work made them targets of organised crime.
For democracy to flourish, a free press is essential. One would think a president whose party came to power on the back of reclaiming freedom for all, would be best placed to understand that. That he doesn’t is either self-serving, due to his naivety or ignorance.