RUTV 3

This story focuses on the creation of COPE and its impact on the South African Students Congress at Rhodes University. COPE formed in December 2008, which was, for all intensive purposes, a break-away party from the ANC, caused a lot of unrest within the ruling party but also within Unions and societies which were historically aligned with the ANC.
One of these unions was the South African Students Union (SASCO). SASCO now had a decision to make, they could either support their members who had defected to the new party COPE, or they could root them out and maintain their alliance to ANC ideology.
To “preserve” their organisation and prevent a split within SASCO, rather than have their organisation split by COPE like the ANC had been, they took the decision, says Xanti Njozela (President of Rhodes SASCO) not to tolerate people who openly supported and campaigned for COPE.

This took place after SASCO’s National Secretary –General Magasela Mzobe (see related links) called for the rejection of COPE on University campuses. Whether or not he was talking about active rejection or not, his words sparked violence amongst SASCO members on many campuses in South Africa where SASCO members and COPE supporters clashes at rallies and other political events, like Butterworth University.
Shortly after it became known to us that there was a pending investigation against COPE supporters within SASCO at Rhodes, we thought that it was worth investigating. It was then revealed that there were almost 50* COPE members within SASCO. While the SASCO president tried to tell us that they were not unwelcome in SASCO he eventually admitted that people who were doing COPE work would in fact not be tolerated and would be subject to disciplinary hearing and possible suspension.
At the same time, COPE at Rhodes is trying to set up their Youth League. However, after missing the SRC deadline for registration of societies, many of their members joined SASCO out of old allegiances and lack of their own society. But they say that once the COPE Youth League is formed on campus there will be a mass extradition from SASCO to the COPE Youth League which would eventually spell the “death” of SASCO according to COPE sources.
*according to COPE representative on Rhodes campus, Loyiso Phantshwa at kazinoekstra kazino igri rotativki plodove.

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The story idea came about after a fellow journalist interviewed Rhodes COPE representative, Loyiso Phantshwa, after the COPE launch on Rhodes campus. During the interview Phantshwa revealed that he was a member of SASCO. We thought this would be a great story considering SASCO has always been affiliated with the ANC and recently on the Butterworth campus, a violent riot broke out between SASCO and COPE because SASCO was called to reject any COPE members. Had COPE infiltrated SASCO Rhodes?  Would SASCO split?

We set up an interview with Rhodes SASCO president Xanti Njozela, for the following morning, however, we needed confirmation and we needed numbers of how many SASCO members were now aligned with COPE before the interview. I then conducted a telephonic interview with Phantshwa to get confirmation of his membership and how many other COPE affiliates were members of SASCO. He confirmed that he was a member though was not active, also confirming around fifty COPE members were part of SASCO.

We conducted the interview with Njozela the following morning. He could neither confirm nor deny the number of COPE members, but maintained there was no potential split. Most of what he said was contrary to Phantshwa’s statements. We knew we had to set up an interview with him to reveal the contradiction and represent the very powerful things he had said over the phone. Due to the time limit of 90secs we really had to focus the insert and stick to the infiltration of COPE in SASCO. So unfortunately we had to leave out of some very controversial accusations made by Phantshwa regarding ANC ideology within SASCO discourse as well as Njozela’s initial denial of bowing to ANC policyand then his eventual defence of SASCO’s support for the ANC.

The Pirate Ducky

You may have watched the vlog on Pirates Pizza’s effort to create employment. Although this was an exciting and interesting piece of soft news, the package was harder than first thought. 

Getting the story

Pirates Pizza is a student-owned business which opened in late 2007. There have been rumours of its expansion/move for a while but the owners don’t want to confirm the rumours or speak about the new launch.

But RUTV reporter Grethe Koen knows the owners and was able to persuade them to allow RUTV to shoot the story as a human interest piece.

Narrowing down the Angle

After we got the story, the next issue was tightening up the focus behind the story. We wanted to include more on the credit crunch, unemployment and the informal sector. We even got some great shots of a vendor on the main street. But, because of the limited time of the package we weren’t able to include the information. 

Surprising content

After clearing up our idea for the story we then went on to shoot the interviews. Grethe and I were both surprised by the content and information that came from the interviews. 

One of the things that struck me is the amount of community engagement the business is planning to get involved in. As a semi-new student business, you don’t expect Pirates Pizza to be worried about developing the community. But according to the General Manager, Jonathan Inngs, Pirates Pizza is going to introduce a number of plans and programs to help feed, clothe and employ people from the township. 

Inngs says Pirates wants to create a business mandate which focuses on giving to the community because they feel as a business “that its vital that we get involved” . 

For those of you who are interested in how Pirates Pizza plans to get involved in the community listen to the audio clip, featuring General Manager Jonathan Inngs, as he talks about their future projects.  [podcast]http://rutv3.ru.ac.za/wp-content/uploads/audio-clip-for-pirates-pizza.mp3[/podcast]

We are suffering from technical difficulties

On the technical side, this story turned out to be a nightmare. Between the black walls in the Pirates building which caused serious lighting issues, to reshooting sign offs and faulty equipment nothing went as planned.

The one lesson that came from this package is that you can never have enough shots. As a cameraperson, you always have to make sure that you have a variety of shots as well as enough action shots to fill the story. And even when you think you have enough, shoot some more!

For instance, in the Pirates Pizza  story one problem was that our shots didn’t match our light content. Producer Paddy Donnelly even critisized the visuals as “unexciting and dull”.

But it wasn’t because we didn’t have interesting shots; instead we made the mistake of ‘not writing to visuals’. We should have instead included shots like this action shot which would have given the story more of a feel good effect.

The prized pizza product

Inspite of all the challenges and things we wish we had done better, we are still proud of our FIRST NEWS STORY. It was a fantastic learning experience on how to produce news and we made great contacts for news and pizza!

Rhodes political rapper S.C.A.M is causing controversy within ANC ranks. In his song “Repetition” he blasted the ANC and in particular ANC Youth League President Julius Malema, by calling him a dimwit. He has sinced received threats from Malema’s office asking him to tone down his language.

BACKGROUND

We were both nervous. It was our first real news assignment. When story ideas were pitched during the tutorial, our story seemed to be the least newsworthy and this was reflected by the fact that it needed a vote to determine whether we could go ahead and film or not. When it was chosen we breathed a sigh of relief but at the same time we did not want to be the tag along news package which just made up the numbers. At the end of the tutorial my partner and I looked at each other confidently but deep down we knew this was going to be no easy challenge.

Automatically we wondered where to interview S.C.A.M, and we decided that the best location was RMR because we knew pictures of him rapping behind the microphone would provide appealing visuals. It seemed like a perfect idea, a rapper in studio, but many obstacles awaited us. We were only able to get a small recording studio, and the humming of the lights made us paranoid about the projection of our sound. We had little space to manoeuvre in, and we had to be creative with the little we had. Being relatively new to the whole experience we struggled at first, but the more minutes we recorded the more likely it seemed we would piece together an effective and entertaining news package.

When we asked S.C.A.M to do the various sequences it was very awkward. Constantly asking him to repeat this and do that. But when S.C.A.M saw the final package with all the sequences tactfully conjoined, he seemed impressed and began to understand and appreciate the work that goes into filming a package.

One of the clips we were forced to leave out due to time constraints: S.C.A.M attacking Julius Malema

 Our interviews with Oscar Dondashe and Dr Hoeane were interesting and intriguing. We had previously established a rapport with both interviewees making the interview process a lot smoother. Both speakers were more than willing to express their views elaborately.

Dr Hoeane from the Politics Department puts everything into perspective during his interview.

 
All of a sudden the impossible job seemed doable. We had our star in the studio and our interviewees provided us with interesting content. All that remained was finishing off the ‘masterpiece’.
No artist wants to be interrupted whilst putting together the final touches to his masterpiece. But our case was different. As we worked away in the early night, we received a call from a friend informing us that S.C.A.M would be performing one song and one song only, at the Nelson Mandela Hall Dinner. We hurriedly packed our equipment in hope of catching some good visuals. But to capture a good sequence when somebody only performs one song is no easy task. We found ourselves running around in front and behind the rapper trying to catch different angles to put a sequence together. We were also concerned after the song was complete that we did not have all the visuals for the sequence we wanted.  However when we uploaded our footage we were pleasantly surprised by what we had and were actually able to compile a one and a half minuet rap video.

Watch a clip of the rap performance at Nelson Mandela Hall Dinner. 

Watching our final package during the news bulletin gave us great satisfaction. It seemed all the hard work and running around with equipment had paid off. It’s strange however that you work for so long to produce only three minutes of footage.

RUTV reporter Tamzyn Degoumois talks to Rhodes Univeristy SASCO Chairperon, Xhanti Njozela, about the organizations demands and concerns in the lead up to the 2009 South African elections