The fine line between fake news and false news … a cautionary tale

Late last month I was sent a statement on WhatsApp that caught my eye.

It was issued by a completely unknown ANC branch chairperson in the eMalahleni municipal council, but what made it interesting was that this Ward 21 chairperson, Vusi Linda, was threating the ANC that if “they purge Supra, we will purge the ANC from eMalahleni”.

Wow, I thought. That’s some fighting talk right there. The rest of the statement outlined why Vusi and his comrades in eMalahleni (the place that used to be called Witbank, by the way), Mpumalanga, felt so strongly about defending North West premier Supra Mahumapelo.

They said Supra had a distinguished struggle history and “in our learned view Supra Mohumapelo [sic] is still the enemy of the Apartheid Bantustan system”.

That’s a bit odd, I thought, since it’s hard to be an enemy of something that doesn’t even exist any more.

Vusi Linda, however, said Mahumapelo had distinguished himself in the 1990s in defying the then Bophuthatswana homeland leader, Lucas Mangope, and his “partriachal Bantustan system”.

He called Mahumapelo a “true, tried and tested leader of the Batswana people”.

Then he explained that it wouldn’t be right to reject Mahumapelo simply because there was a new president in charge of the country and the ANC.

“We are members of the ANC and, beyond being a premier, Mahumapelo is, like us, an ANC member. We will therefore defend him in the same way we defended Jacob Zuma, Harry Gwala and Oliver Tambo.

“If the criminal and financially endorsed protests in Mahikeng are to remove Mohumapelo, then in eMalahleni the protests will be to remove the ANC. We realise that the Unity project was a false parade for our former premier DD Mabuza to ascend to glory. A glory that will be short-lived. The ability to fight is an innate gift of ours,” Vusi Linda’s statement concluded.

Okay, I thought. This is a nice little story on a slow news day about some disgruntled ANC members in Mpumalanga who are making grand threats and even throwing some rocks at Deputy President David Mabuza. So I called Linda’s number, which was at the bottom of the statement.

I asked him if he wasn’t concerned about a possible backlash from the ANC for making such threats, but Vusi Linda appeared not to understand my concerns and passed the phone to another man, a well-spoken gentleman who introduced himself as Gregory Nhlanhla, “the MMC of agriculture and the environment in eMalahleni”.

Nhlanhla backed up the statement, confirmed that Linda was the branch chairperson of Ward 21 in eMalahleni and said that “if they want to meet us on the streets, we will meet them on the streets” in relation to Mahumapelo’s opponents.

He then asked me to send Vusi Linda a WhatsApp link of the article once I’d published it, and he promised that, if he liked it, he’d give me scoops about corruption in the eMalahleni local council that would “make your career”.

For many a journalist, I assume that all of this may have been enough to push the publish button. And I wouldn’t have blamed them if they did. But still, I went on to the eMalahleni website just to be safe, because when I googled either Vusi Linda’s name or Gregory Nhlanhla’s, nothing came up.

On the website, the Ward 21 chairperson was not listed as Vusi Linda. It was a woman named BS Shabangu. So I gave her a call.

I was about to discover that just because someone’s initials may be ‘BS’, they may indeed still be the real thing and it’s the other people who are shovelling the real BS around.

Councillor Shabangu told me she’d never heard of anyone named Vusi Linda or Gregory Nhlanhla … and why was I asking her such questions on a public holiday while she was sick in bed?

So, obviously, I didn’t publish and nearly forgot about the story.

Days later, when I was telling a colleague about all this, I decided to phone the council and ask whether Gregory Nhlanhla really was the MMC of agriculture and the environment.

When I finally got through to the right person, I was informed there wasn’t even such a department. And the MMC of waste and environment was someone named Mahlobo.

So I called Vusi Linda again, and he seemed quite pleased to hear from me again. I asked him how his little statement had been received so far, and he said: “Very well, we got a letter from deputy secretary-general Jessie Duarte addressing our concerns.”

“That’s great, Vusi. There’s just one detail I need to ask you about…”

So I asked him to confirm that he was indeed the Ward 21 chairperson. Again, he confirmed it. Then when I enquired about why Shabangu was actually the one listed in the position on the municipal website, and not him, he hung up.

When I called back, it went to voicemail.

Truly, I don’t know why people do these things. I’m not even irritated by it any more. People are just full of shit, and always will be.

And I don’t really even know what the moral of my little story is, except to ask you, Dear Reader, to spare a thought for us poor journalists who are daily confronted by such little Decepticons trying to lead us by the nose, right up the garden path.