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Fourth estate capture

State capture is most efficiently curtailed by a free and independent
media. The ideal environment for raiding the public purse is therefore
one in which the fourth estate – the press – does not function optimally.
Under Ace Magashule’s watch, the Free State government moulded the
province’s media landscape into a friendlier and more forgiving space
by propping up allies in the industry and effectively suppressing critical
publications.
Local journalists who exposed Magashule’s skeletons were threatened
and intimidated, but the province’s foremost critical media voices were
ultimately muzzled using what appears to have been a deliberate
financial strategy. Millions of rands in taxpayers’ money were
channelled to blatantly obsequious media platforms while
simultaneously withheld from those that refused to toe the line.
A calculated plan to capture the province’s collective budgets for
advertising, communication, printing and related services began to take
shape a year into Magashule’s first term as premier. Up until then, the
Free State’s provincial departments were responsible for managing
their own budgets for media and communications services. But in
March 2010 , Wisani Ngobeni, the chief director of communication in
the Free State premier’s office and Magashule’s long-time spin doctor,
compiled a report that paved the way for the centralisation of the
separate departments’ media budgets.^1
Instead of creating a new entity to oversee expenditure, Ngobeni
proposed that the premier’s office become the ‘implementing agent’ for