It was not long before such sentiments gained traction within the
ANC’s formal structures. In March 2012 , The Weekly reported that
‘ANC Youth League leaders have declared war against Free State
Times, accusing the newspaper of waging an anti-ANC agenda’. The
article quoted ANC Youth League Fezile Dabi regional secretary
Phindile Motha as saying that her organisation supported the ANC’s
controversial call for the establishment of a media tribunal, and that the
Free State Times would be the first publication to appear before it. ‘We
should seriously begin to probe as to who is funding this paper and its
agenda,’ Motha told The Weekly. ‘In asking we should remember the
info scandal of 1979 and we will certainly be guided to find
answers.’^37 She seemed unaware of the irony of her comments. The so-
called information or Muldergate scandal involved the
misappropriation of apartheid state funds for covert propaganda
projects. In the Free State’s case, it was The Weekly that was being
propped up with government funding, not the Free State Times.
The hostility was not confined to The Weekly’s pages. According to
Peta, Free State Times reporters and staffers were exposed to
intimidation and threats when they attended government press
briefings and other events. ‘I once received a phone call from someone
who told me I should go back to Zimbabwe,’ Peta told me. ‘Before he
hung up, he asked me if I remembered what had happened to Noby
Ngombane.’
But the biggest threat to the Free State Times’s continued existence
was financial in nature. Peta told me Magashule effectively placed ‘an
embargo’ on state advertising in his newspaper. It is something that
clearly still irks him. ‘If we had received a fraction of The New Age’s
government advertising revenue, we would have been fine,’ he said. ‘It
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