By Gillian Schutte
Rebecca Davis, Senior Gossip Columnist at Daily Maverick, has once again decided to grace us with her idea of journalism: a barrage of petty, agenda-driven attacks masquerading as serious critique.
In her latest hatchet job on Former President Jacob Zuma and Former Cabinet Minister Lindiwe Sisulu, she throws around accusations and condescension with abandon, making one wonder why she's not even trying to disguise the fact that she has been hired not to inform, but simply to smear.
It’s all in a day’s work, apparently, for a journalist who has turned character assassination into a full-time gig.
If this is what passes for journalism at Daily Maverick, then standards have indeed fallen spectacularly low.
Let’s start with Davis’s treatment of Former President Zuma’s speech on Robben Island, where he addressed the audience following a tour of the prison for the launch of the Sisulu Foundation for Social Justice on 31 October 2024. Zuma’s address, a narrative that was both poignant and compelling, used storytelling and pauses to highlight the pain of historical erasure.
His deliberate style and “forgetfulness” weren’t signs of incoherence, as Davis gleefully reports, but a clever literary device—a tool to remind his audience of the country’s forgotten injustices, like the lingering exploitation of townships and banks’ continuing role in economic oppression.
But does Davis recognise this as a sophisticated, intentional approach? No.
She dismisses him as “rambling,” fixating on his delivery rather than his message. Her tone drips with such blatant disdain that one might mistake her for someone who’s never read a speech more nuanced than a shopping list.
This is not critique, Rebecca; it is intellectual laziness hiding behind a veneer of "earnest reporting.”
The Robben Island tour was later followed by an inaugural gathering at UCT's Graduate School of Business.
The event, honouring Albertina Sisulu's legacy, drew an array of notable speakers, including Reverend Allan Boesak, a renowned theologian and anti-apartheid activist; Professor Kwame Amuah; and Her Excellency Ambassador Arikana Chihombori-Quao, MD and founder of the African Diaspora Development Institute (ADDI). Not that their gravitas mattered to Davis, who is, apparently, as anti-intellectual as fellow smearer Karyn Maughan.
Here is where Davis's weird fixation on UCT’s involvement in hosting the Sisulu Foundation event unfolds.
Davis, with all the zeal of someone who thinks venue logistics make for a groundbreaking exposé, has latched onto the fact that UCT’s Vice-Chancellor, Professor Mosa Moshabela, did not attend the event.
She inflates this minor detail into a scandalous revelation, as though this absence somehow delegitimises the entire evening.
I was there, and Zuma’s presence was hardly unexpected.
In fact, Professor Linda Ronnie, Deputy Vice-Chancellor of UCT’s Graduate School of Business, who sat right behind me, loudly complained about Zuma’s late arrival, muttering about his “disrespect” in arriving five minutes behind schedule.
When I asked if she was referring to the president, she snapped back, “You mean former president.”
Her own condescension, her irritation with an 82-year-old man who had just spent the day on Robben Island—these are the real embarrassments here, not some manufactured scandal about UCT’s supposed lack of integrity.
But Davis is undeterred by facts or context.
Instead, she seizes on irrelevant minutiae—who booked the venue, who was listed on the programme, and who didn’t show up—to build a shaky case that only reveals her desperation.
In her mind, the Faculty of Health Sciences providing a spokesperson for the event is tantamount to an ideological betrayal.
It’s laughable. It's also downright cringeworthy that Davis is not in the least bit embarrassed about her own obtuseness. Universities, by their very nature, are venues for discussion, debate, and diverse perspectives.
Davis, however, seems convinced that UCT has some sacred duty to uphold her personal views and that even allowing Jacob Zuma and Lindiwe Sisulu a platform is an unforgivable affront.
And what about her favourite term, “anti-constitutional”?
Davis uses it like a club, repeatedly hammering in the idea that Former President Zuma and Former Minister Sisulu’s critiques of the Constitution are somehow treasonous.
But anyone with a shred of political intelligence knows that critiquing the Constitution isn’t anti-democratic; it’s a necessary part of any healthy democracy.
Respected thinkers like economist Patrick Bond have argued that the Constitution’s liberal, market-friendly structure entrenches inequality rather than dismantling it.
Bond puts it plainly: “The Constitution promised transformative change, but instead, it has entrenched economic power in the hands of a few.”
Ronnie Kasrils has also critiqued the document for its failure to break down apartheid’s economic legacies. But do these critiques get the same treatment from Davis?
Of course not.
Davis saves her vitriol for Zuma and Sisulu alone, as though their critiques are somehow uniquely threatening.
The hypocrisy is mind-blowing. If a figure from Davis’s ideological circle were to critique the Constitution, it would be celebrated as brave and insightful.
But because it’s Sisulu and Zuma, she casts their ideas as dangerous, “anti-constitutional” rhetoric.
It’s clear that her loyalty does not lie with open democratic discourse but with a rigid neoliberal framework that cannot tolerate dissent. For Davis, the Constitution isn’t a living document that can evolve to address the needs of the South African people—it’s a weapon to wield against anyone who has the temerity to suggest it might be inadequate.
Davis’s attempts to paint Zuma and Sisulu as “subversive” are not only dishonest but transparently manipulative.
She’s not interested in exploring the substance of their arguments, the historical context, or the genuine grievances they voice on behalf of South Africa’s poor and marginalised.
Instead, she treats the Constitution as a holy text and any critique of it as heresy. This isn’t intellectual engagement; it’s ideological policing, an attempt to gatekeep who is “allowed” to critique South Africa’s political framework and who isn’t.
And the only people granted that privilege, apparently, are those who don’t actually want real change.
Davis’s contempt runs so deep that she even resorts to mocking Sisulu’s background.
In her eyes, Sisulu’s legacy and name are just more fodder for her ongoing smear campaign. Davis conveniently forgets that Sisulu’s family played a pivotal role in the struggle for democracy—a contribution that Davis, in her crusade to degrade, couldn’t care less about.
Sisulu’s critiques of the judiciary are grounded in legitimate concerns about the state’s failure to deliver real justice for all South Africans, yet Davis twists this into some kind of anti-judicial diatribe. It’s a straw man so flimsy it’s wholly embarrassing to read, yet Davis writes it with all the gravitas of someone who imagines she’s performing a public service.
And here’s the kicker: Davis has the gall to portray herself as a crusader for truth, a fearless journalist holding power to account. But what she’s really doing is reinforcing power, protecting an economic order that keeps millions mired in poverty.
The Constitution that she so zealously defends is, as Bond and Kasrils have pointed out, a document designed to safeguard the interests of the elite, yet she positions herself as its defender, casting anyone who questions it as unworthy of a platform.
Her work is not a service to South Africans; it’s a disservice, an exercise in ideological gatekeeping that only benefits those who are already comfortable.
Rebecca Davis, Senior Gossip Columnist at Daily Maverick, is not a journalist; she’s a propagandist, a mouthpiece for a failing neoliberal project that can’t handle the truth.
Her article is not an “analysis” but a personal vendetta dressed up as journalism.
It’s time we see it for what it is—a most shoddy attempt to smear those who question the status quo, delivered by someone who has no interest in truth, only in maintaining her own ideological comfort.
Davis, Maughan, and the whole Daily Maverick/News24 cabal ought to reflect on what they’ve become.
They are certainly not the champions of democracy they think they are, but court jesters for the powerful, dressing up shallow biases as if they’re worth reading. This is not journalism. It's a disgrace.
* Gillian Schutte is a film-maker, and a well-known social justice and race-justice activist and public intellectual.
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.
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