Interview with media leader Phathiswa Magopeni as she joins the Press Council
PICTURE: A portrait by photographer Moeletsi Mabe of our new member, Phathiswa Magopeni. Courtesy of Sowetan
The Press Council this week welcomed Phathiswa Magopeni as a new member. Magopeni was nominated by the South African National Editors’ Forum (SANEF) to replace former member Nathan Geffen as its representative.
Magopeni will serve a five-year term with the Press Council.
Read about our constituent members and the other Council members here.
This interview with Magopeni first appeared in June 2024.
Yemisi Akinbobola
Phathiswa Magopeni is a South African-born media personality and former Head of News and Current Affairs at the SABC. She is currently a member of its Board.
Phathiswa opens up about her early life, the challenges she faced after losing her mother at a young age and how those experiences shaped her into the determined and independent person she is today.
She also discusses her tenure at SABC, the struggles she encountered, and her unwavering commitment to journalistic integrity.
I’ve been looking forward to this interview. You’ve got years of experience in the media, and I know that you also started your career as a lecturer, so it’s really great to see your journey in the media from academia, and I look forward to really digging into that and getting to understand it from your perspective.
Now, if we google the name Phathiswa Magopeni, what we’ll see is all the things that happened at SABC. But we really want to go a lot deeper than the things we can find on Google. We want to know who Phathiswa Magopeni is.
What was it like growing up?
I was born in the remote rural villages of the Eastern Cape. I spent the first 20 years of my life in that environment. It was the time when I completed high school that I left the province to go to Cape Town, which is where I got to do my first university degree.
I lost my mother at the age of eight, and I have four siblings. And at the time of my mother’s demise, she was giving birth to the last-born. You can imagine the kind of environment that we ended up in.
In fact, when we joke about it at home, we would say that because we had to be split – two of us were sent to live with relatives, two of us remained at home and my brother was taken elsewhere – those who left home were ‘in exile’. We had to … face the hardships of being at home because my father was working about a thousand kilometres from home, in the dockyard … in Cape Town.
So, staying at home, and having to struggle in the years of my mother’s death actually exposed me to a lot of hardships [and] for me, it was like a preparation for what I was to deal with in my adult life. Every time I look back, I keep saying, it was worse than this before.
But again, in a true African sense, it doesn’t matter what your situation is, if you grow up in an environment where you don’t have parents, you are always a child of the community, which is actually what shaped my young life, because we had all these people around who tried to shield us from hunger and all sorts of things that we would have been exposed to.
In fact, sometimes I say I’m glad that I grew up in that environment and not in a city environment, because things could have turned out differently if I’d grown up in a city without my mother.
I think that there was an element of being fortunate that it happened while I was in a rural environment, where people still cared about the next-door neighbour’s child.
I then left the rural environment and went to varsity [and that] was the first time I was exposed to people who spoke English with a different accent, let alone the fact that you were not even exposed to proper English where I grew up.
You have to listen to a teacher who’s a white person speaking English or speaking Afrikaans or a different language. So the accent is going to be different. We would literally come from the villages and sit in the front row in the lecture hall so that we could read their lips because listening to them was so difficult.
Was that the same university you then became a lecturer in?
Yes, I started lecturing there, and in fact, I started tutoring when I was doing my third year. So we would assemble as groups and would be sharing lessons and people thought that I knew better.
I ended up being appointed by the Department of isiXhosa, which was one of the official languages at the time, to be a tutor for the department. Then I became a part-time lecturer and then a full-time lecturer in 1995.
It was an interesting journey. I had some relatives in the townships, so on weekends I would say, I’m going to visit my relatives in the townships, and I knew that I wasn’t doing that. It was because I had nothing.
I wouldn’t have body lotions, soap, toothbrush and toothpaste. So for me, that was the moment that I would travel to the suburbs in Cape Town, look for domestic chores like ironing and cleaning people’s houses, and come back to campus late.
From there, I had the money that would take me through the week to buy food because I had no access to the dining hall. I had no scholarship, I had nothing. So I had to make things work while I was on campus.
How did all of that shape who you became in terms of having to live that double life and having to find your way through university in the way that you did?
I look back now and think about one of the things I haven’t been able to overcome. I don’t know how to make friends. And in fact, I’ve stopped bothering. I’m a loner, and it does help me to some extent because I take responsibility for the decisions that I make.
I don’t have to ask anyone, and I’m not going to seek advice from anyone and look back and say, I wish I had done this thing differently if I had not taken that advice.
But [because of] what happened in my childhood, for some reason, I drew a lot of attention to myself because I was a loner – even as a child. During breaks, I would go and hide behind the classrooms because I had nothing like a lunchbox … It was me not going to expose myself by begging other children for whatever they had.
In fact, I would go back home to sleep on an empty tummy because there was nothing at home.
No one knew what was happening in my life, and even at varsity, that I ended up doing domestic chores and not telling anyone that I was actually doing [that] to get money for anything that I needed.
It meant that I needed to protect my space and that no one got to know what was happening in my life. That translated to my adult life. To date, no one knows what’s happening in my life. I’ve always had this shield around myself so that no one is able to penetrate.
It did affect me in the things that I’ve gone through at different stages of my life. Sometimes I think that if I had people who I was close to or who were close to me, I would have been shielded from some of the things that happened to me … I’ve always had to deal with these things myself, to the point where at times, I do think that things would have turned out differently in some of the cases if I had people that I spoke to.
When your mom sadly passed away? Can you take us through that period and how that was for you at that time?
It was hard. Some of the things that happened then, I carry them in my body. I have hard soles from four years of walking to and from school without shoes. It doesn’t matter the level of manicure and waxing that you put my feet through, it won’t make it soft.
So when I say I carry some of those experiences in my body, I mean it in every sense.
My mother was a trained teacher, but at the time, I don’t know whether it was a law that when you got married, you were not supposed to be a professional teacher or a nurse, but you had to be a stay-at-home mom. So I never got to experience my mother as a teacher because when we were born, she was already a stay-at-home mom and she was a very hardworking individual.
We look back at things that we had at home, some of the things that we see as ‘new age’ stuff, my mother introduced us to those things. So when she passed on and we lost all of that, it was very hard for us to transition from a life where we had everything.
My father was working in Cape Town and my mother had this smallholding-kind of subsistence farming. We had livestock.
I remember we had about 100 sheep when she passed on which I used to look after, and my younger brother used to look after the goats that were in the seventies. There was another boy who was staying with us from my aunt, and he used to look after the cattle. So it was split.
My mother had this thing that, if your part of the livestock didn’t come back on that day with the rest of the stock, you were not going to have supper. That was the punishment. And you were not going to sleep inside the house until you found it.
So that’s how our mother groomed us – that there were always consequences for any decisions that you made. I remember one woman who would come when our mother was punishing us … and she would say, you are going to kill these children. And my mother would say, leave them. You don’t know what’s going to happen when I’m not here.
It’s only when we look back, and these women are relating these stories, that it’s as if she knew she was going to leave us. At the point my mother passed on, I could prepare dough for bread. I could cook some of the basic stuff, because at times when she would visit my father in Cape Town, she would tell the neighbours, look after that house, but those people know how to cook for themselves – and that was us at my young age.
It was a very hard period when she left us. It didn’t help that some of the family members helped themselves with our clothes and some of the things that my mother had. That’s how I lost a pair of shoes that I had for school. I lost my uniform. I lost a lot of stuff. And I was left with a few items that I kept recycling because I had nothing else.
In fact, I had one jersey. I remember it was blue with shiny buttons. It didn’t matter what the season was, that’s all I had. And going to my father in his later years – he passed on in 2007, and he was with me when he passed on – I would ask him what happened to him when my mother passed on, because we could still feel the sense of brokenness in him …
It was a huge loss for us. It got to a point where even though I was young, I had to look after my younger brother, who was with me at home at the time. Even though the family had sought someone else, a relative who was going to come and stay with us, it didn’t work properly … It didn’t shield us from the poverty that we had to face when my mother was gone.
So I would have to go … to look after whatever needed to be attended to in the fields, and that’s when I learned how to harvest maize and whatever else … for us to get a share of whatever they had from the fields. That’s how we got food. And there were times when we would go around the village, begging.
That level of poverty, resilience, having to fend for yourself at such a young age, how would you say that shaped your future life?
Going back to the village and how the villagers assisted us? It bothers me when I see people who are suffering, and I think that’s what informed my approach to journalism as well.
I would rather give whatever that I have or share whatever that I have in instances where I see people experiencing what I experienced at the time, because I’m also a product of other people’s generosity. It makes sense for me to share my stuff with others who are in need.
In fact … [when] I was invited by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington … I had 15 months of no salary after my departure from the SABC, and I had lost a lot of money on legal costs. I had to make serious adjustments to my whole lifestyle.
I had to take back the car that I was driving because I couldn’t afford it with no salary. I was starting to fall into arrears in most of my responsibilities, including my house. So on the morning of my travelling to the US, even though we knew that we were going to be getting money from the organisers when we got to the US, I only had two slices of bread at home and I had tea.
I called my sister [who’s a teacher in one of the schools in Princetown] that morning because I needed money to get an Uber to take me to the airport, and I needed to cut my hair. At least I had to do those things. It was the first time that I had to beg my siblings for anything because I’ve always tried to take care of my stuff …
Immediately, she sent me the money. As I was sitting and having this tea and bread, it took me back to the time when I used to treasure bread – just the smell of bread, even if I wasn’t going to have it … It used to be a luxury to us at the time I was growing up …
So I got to the airport, and all I was saying to myself was, I’ve got nothing else now … Here I am. I can’t even go to one of the lounges. I can’t buy myself anything. I can’t even buy myself water in this environment, because I’ve got nothing.
All I knew was that once I got to that plane, I was going to be like everyone else. I would be served food like anyone else. Whoever is sitting next to me won’t know my situation. And when I get to the other side, I know exactly what’s going to happen because we’ll be getting the money that we were supposed to have for subsistence.
But here’s what happened when I got to the US. One lady I was travelling with from Cape Town paid for Uber from the airport to the hotel because we were going to be reimbursed for that. [But] at the hotel, it’s standard that you need a credit card that has money to be checked [in, and] I don’t have money …
I was sitting at the reception, and later I thought, it’s getting dark. What am I going to do? I had to ask the same lady who paid for the Uber … if she could loan me money. So that’s how I actually got to secure the room the same night. Otherwise, I would have slept in the hotel lobby.
So I’ve had these dramatic moments. But for me, none of those things shocked me because I’ve been through this and I’ve been through the worst in my life.
I think it is a good point for us to kind of go into what happened at SABC when you had this experience of what you called a ‘culture of flouting due process’ as a broadcaster.
The allegation was that you were being asked to do an interview with the president [Cyril Ramaphosa] and his wife [Dr Tshepo Motsepe], which, in terms of editorial standards, were things that you were not going to do.
As a result, there was a case against you alleging that you had allowed a particular programme to go on air. But actually, it was something much bigger that led to that.
So let’s go back to the beginning of your experience at the SABC. Leading up to that point, what was it like for you as a woman of your background and your context to have been at that top position in such an organisation?
It’s quite interesting because [it’s been] six years [since] the rebranding of the SABC news division as a public news service, using impartiality and independence principles as co-editorial pillars …
I went to the new SABC having an idea of what needed to be done … The SABC had been in the public domain for all sorts of reasons, but largely around editorial issues and editorial control. I did [the rebranding of the news division] three months after joining.
I recall an interview that I did on my second day at the SABC, and that’s the time I started talking about the independence and impartiality of the news division.
Somehow there was resistance even from within in terms of the direction I was taking the newsroom, because there were questions from politicians and other interested people who wanted to know what I meant or what it meant to have an editorially independent newsroom or impartially-framed news-gathering processes
I had to explain myself. But for me, it was a simple thing because the two principles come from the editorial process of the SABC, so it was not something that I heard from outside, but it was difficult for people to internalise that it meant the control of editorial processes was confined to the newsroom now – that no one outside the newsroom had a say in what the newsroom was doing.
But it got to a point where everybody got to understand internally, and in fact, everybody took it on board and it became a way of life within the SABC.
[Then] came national elections in 2019, I then had to go around the country addressing politicians about the approach that we’re taking editorially; how we were going to treat our coverage and how we’re going to treat political parties, because there was still a sense from the traditionally-preferred political parties that including smaller parties in our coverage was a waste of resources.
That’s how it was framed: that it was a waste of resources and [that] all we needed was to focus on the big parties. My view was that that’s not how multi-party democracy works, and if you’re going to talk about equity as we know it, it means you need to give space to the smaller ones so that they can communicate their messaging.
Otherwise, if you’re going to focus on big parties, what that means is that you are maintaining the status quo, and you are not supporting multi-party democracy if you are disregarding smaller parties.
Everybody bought into it because even the smaller parties now were appreciating the fact that they had a voice, they had a platform they could go to, and the space was open for them to communicate their messaging. But somehow it was still not going down well, even though I could not pinpoint where the biggest problems were because, at some point, I had threats to my life.
One time someone tried to force me off the road when I was driving out of the fuel station in my area. I don’t know what was happening. All I know is that I had to drive straight to a police station and be escorted by the police to my house and post that incident.
There were several others, but by the time we were going to the 2019 elections, closer to the period, I was assigned protection services by the SABC because they’d done an assessment … by the police … and I couldn’t leave my house without protection services and I couldn’t come back to my house without being escorted [and] that meant that my life was confined to certain spaces …
Up until post-elections in 2019, there were ramblings about how we were covering the elections, and my approach was, we needed to do what was in the best interests of the country as we saw things. It was serving the public, taking the messaging to the public, taking the voices of the public and elevating them in our coverage …
When I joined the SABC, we had about 928 journalists in the system, all production staff in the news division, sitting across the country serving the 11 official languages … There was already a moratorium on appointments because the SABC had no money at the time, so we ended up losing more people in the news division. Even at the time I was joining, more people had already left the system without being replaced, and so there were gaps already … but we’re trying to make things work with what we had.
My point was, if you have 11 languages that you need to serve, and you have all these platforms that you need to serve … how was the news division going to cope … and that was my first fall-out.
There were threats to suspend me and to subject me to disciplinary processes. I still have that correspondence because some were WhatsApp messages. I remember saying, go ahead and do it. And then I also had cases where I was told that I needed to take action against newsroom staff who were part of the meeting that I was called into that ended up being televised live …
I said, no. If you think that they had no valid reasons to raise whatever concerns they had, you can go ahead. I wasn’t going to do it. And the threat was, again, if you don’t do it, we’ll subject you to a disciplinary process. And I would just say, go ahead, let’s see what’s going to happen. And they never did it.
But then, coming to the 2021 elections, the relations had started thinning already, and I knew exactly where I stood. I knew that I didn’t even have the support of other executives because no one was talking to me. From that period of retrenchments, no one was talking to me. No one would check on me on what was happening, even though people knew exactly what I was going through, but no one bothered to check on me …
It was glaring that no one was asking after seeing what was happening in the newsroom – that no one even picked up a call and said, how are you doing? All I knew was that the following day, I still needed to go to work and continue with what I needed to do.
So in 2021, the country was celebrating 25 years of democracy and we had programmes dedicated to elections programming. One of those was Democracy Gauge, which was questioned extensively by politicians about what it meant.
It was about getting the citizens to talk about their experiences in the 25 years of democracy. That’s basically what the programme was about. We would get a person to narrate their stories and their experiences without editing any of the stuff that they were talking about because it was their lived experiences … So … that upset politicians.
We [then] had a ‘service delivery gauge’ [during] local government elections, where people were to talk about their experiences in how the government had been serving them … [and] that’s where the problem started.
We had the first episode. Subsequent episodes were determined by the public because we went to the first area, people spoke about their experiences and they showed us what their living conditions were … [and] as we would be finishing … the next group in a different community would be saying, come to us. We want to show you what’s happening here. So it was more like co-created with citizens.
And so that’s where the problem started. Some of the questions were around why we were targeting these communities and not others where politicians thought things were working better. But in the end, it was clear where things were going.
So, about this interview with the president. We had been asking for an interview with the president from the time I joined the SABC in 2018, and he had done interviews with two of the private broadcasters in the country, but not with the SABC.
The only interview that we were granted was a radio interview in my very early days, and it was like specific radio stations that were granted that interview, but for TV interviews, we were treated like everyone else, where you would catch the president wherever he was, and then you get to do that interview. But for a one-on-one interview with the public broadcaster, we never had that privilege up until now.
So in 2021, we tried so hard and were waiting, because the very last confirmation before the incident was for a Thursday interview that was to take place. It was to be conducted by the politics editor at the SABC. Then we got a cancellation because the president had to go elsewhere. There was a protest that he needed to go to – a committee that he needed to go and address. So we never got that interview.
Post that cancellation, on a Sunday morning, I woke up and got calls from the CEO that the president was in Limpopo. He was going to a private radio station, and I was asked to deploy a team that would cover the president at this radio station.
I told the CEO that we have our radio platforms and therefore we would not cover the president outside our own systems. How would I have explained to our own commercial radio stations that we are collaborating with competing radio stations?
The whole thing didn’t make sense, and any editor would have taken the decision that there was no way that we were going to take [that] interview [instead of one of our own].
The second thing was that we don’t have a current affairs programme. At the time the president was going to be on site, we had no news staff, except for the radio programming staff … So now I’m expected to call people who are sitting at home, and people who have their own engagements, to come and conduct an interview.
Only the politics editor was doing those interviews because we wanted consistency in how the party leaders were treated in terms of the questions that we were going to ask, and the tone of the interview, so that no one would come out and say, But I was given that person and not the other person, or, I prefer this and not another editor to interview me.
My point was, this interview is not going to happen. We don’t have staff. Editors have not had a discussion on how this interview is going to be handled in the first place.
I then explained, and I thought that it had gone away. Later in the day, the Board chair called me and [asked], What do we tell the president? And I said, tell the president that the interview is not happening because we don’t have any interview schedule with the president. It’s that simple.
I’m not going to okay an interview that I know editors know nothing about because I also have to protect the authority of editors. I can’t overrule. So the whole thing subsided. But I realised, looking backwards, that that was the end of our communication.
Elections were the following week, usually, I would be asked about the state of readiness, what’s in place, and what’s not in place. This time around, it didn’t happen, and no one was bothered. That’s when I started picking up signals.
Then, out of the blue, [a programme] that was put on ice … shows up on air. At no point was [it] meant to go to air [because it had been interdicted], but it showed up … and I had no idea what had happened. The team had no idea what had happened because they were clear about what was to play on that day.
And then I was asked to write a report about what happened, what had transpired. But at that time, somehow, all things that have to do with interdicts and all legal matters that involve the division, were handled by the news division. We would ask for legal advice from the legal division, but this time around, none of that information was coming to the news division. It was handled in the office of the CEO.
In the end, I ended up being charged for authorising [that programme going on] air, something that I never did because everybody knew, the team knew, that [it] was interdicted. No one instructed for [it] to go to air.
What aired on that day is not what was provided. There was a show that was provided with a name and the title and everything that was to play on that day, but somehow this thing showed up.
So that’s how the whole thing started, with the disciplinary process I had to go through. But for me, it was like, I am not going to leave this thing. It’s not just about clearing my name. There’s also a team behind me, the Special Assignment team that’s also wondering about how this thing happened. I had to make sure that I also dealt with that aspect of the case.
But in the end, it was clear that the case was not going to go anywhere, so it was settled.
You mentioned how you went to SABC with a vision. What has been your approach in getting people on board with your vision and taking people along?
I think about things and I see them in my head. but I always try and get people to do what I have thought about, because, at times, by the time things get done, I’ve moved on. I’m no longer interested in that because I think other people will be able to implement it.
So I always make sure that I bring people on board immediately because I know I’m going to get bored if I stick to this one thing until it finishes.
I would sit with the teams and I would say, these are the things that I think we need to do. But then I would give them space to translate them into reality. And this is how people got excited about the things that I would think about.
If we’re sitting in an editorial meeting, I would say, If there’s a bridge that’s being opened today, it’s not an SABC story. That’s a government project. What is an SABC story out of that project? And this is how our editorial meetings became vibrant because it forced people to think outside events.
And we would say there have been floods in this area or there have been killings in this area. The premier of that province is visiting a family that’s been affected. And the question would be the premier is doing his job, going to that family. What is this story? What is the public service story that the SABC is going to tell?
And it forced people to think. So the newsroom came to understand how I would think about things and how they needed to translate that into what became the editorial ethos of the newsroom, as in, how do we tell the stories in a manner that the public understands what we represent and what we are there to do as SABC News.
When you think about all of the things that subsequently happened that led to your departure and what you’ve described there, it sounds a lot like some form of bullying and having to stand up for yourself and having to really push that vision.
So when you think about all of that and think about what you did through those processes how would you sum that up? How did you become brave in such a moment and stand with your guns?
I have something that I’ve observed lately and it was during the 2021 process with the SABC.
Whenever I get shocked or there’s something that excites me that has happened, immediately I hear the news, I would want to sleep. It’s something, I don’t know where it comes from and I don’t know what it means but somehow all I want is to sleep.
In fact, I recall the day I received the letter of dismissal [which] landed at 04:00 on my laptop, and by 05:00, I was gone. I woke up the following morning. And that was very much unlike me because my sleep is usually only five hours. It doesn’t matter what time I sleep. But that day I went to bed and I was gone until the following day and I had this flood of messages.
I had calls, from home, from colleagues and from all sorts of people who wanted to know how I was doing and what I was going through and wanted to talk to me.
The following day I woke up and I had this clarity of mind and calmness that I didn’t know where it came from. And all I wanted to know was what was going to be my next step. That’s all I was worried about because I had no confusion about the fact that I was dismissed. In fact, I had no misery about the fact that I found myself in that position. All I was thinking about was what was going to be my next step.
I think I also have a calmness that I don’t know where it comes from because, at times, I get frustrated with myself when I’m supposed to be fighting for things and somehow my body just refuses, and my mind refuses to fight.
People were asking me about why I was not doing an interview on what I’ve gone through. In fact, this is my first interview. At the time I was going through the case, I had a list of media houses that wanted to talk to me, and I would say, I’ll think about it later, but I don’t want to talk because one thing that I’ve learned is a tactic: if you don’t share what you’re going to do, no one can predict your next move. That’s what I’ve learned
And I know that every time the SABC thought about what I was going to do next, they had no idea what I was going to do. In fact, they had no idea that I was going to end up on the Board in the first place because no one knew. I’m the only person who knew what my ‘next step’ was going to be.
So I knew that if I expose myself to the media, I’m going to find myself talking about things that I am not ready to talk about. And I also didn’t want to speak out of anger.
And so I normally end this interview with a question of, What next? But I’m going to honour what you said: that you don’t reveal your ‘what next’ to people. So that’s not going to be my last question. What I’m going to say to you is that your story is beyond inspirational.
To our listeners/readers, who are at whatever stage of their career: what is the one resounding piece of advice you want to give, based on your experience, to guide their journey?
Trust your intuition. That has been my biggest thing and what I’ve learned.
Even though the whole thing of not having people that I would call ‘friends’ who are close to me, I think where it has helped [is that] I’ve got a lot of time to talk to myself, and I do. I’ve got a lot of time to interrogate my own thoughts, and I think I understand myself better because there are things that I know [are] going to trigger me and I must stay away from them.
And at times, I would say, this thing is going to trigger me [but] I’m going to push for it. I want to see where it’s going to end.
So I’ve come to understand myself at that level. I trust my intuition. When something says, don’t go that route … I listen to that. But I think the fact that I’ve been able to be in my own space, and be in my own mind, and understand my thought patterns [means] I know when I go off the rails in my thinking. I know myself. I’ve got to know myself at that level …
I would be sitting in a discussion and I would smile at myself because I’ve just thought about something and I know that it’s wrong. So I’m able to quieten myself. I’m able to quieten my mind and say, no, I need to listen more. But with the level of noise that’s around us, it’s difficult …
So I make time for myself. I make time to think, and I don’t think we make enough time to think, and we need more of it.
Thank you so much Phathiswa Magopeni, it has been more than an honour to speak with you and interact with you today.
Thank you so much for sharing your story with us.
- Listen to the podcast of this African Women in Media (AWIM) interview here. With thanks to Blessing Udeobasi of AWIM.
