The ANA Games: Iqbal Versus Everyone Else

Newspaper mogul throws a Survé ball at his news agency employees

AT THE END OF OCTOBER, IQBAL Survé will close down the domestic newswire service of the African News Agency (ANA) he founded four years ago when the South African Press Association (Sapa) collapsed. The demise of ANA is a telling footnote in Survé’s desperate fight against creditors, fiscal authorities and the Mpati Commission of Inquiry into the Public Investment Corporation (PIC). His aides have been spinning it with claims that the company is to be transformed into a “content curation and syndication platform with global reach”.

Whether Survé truly believes that the venture can successfully compete with Bloomberg and Reuters, without producing a paragraph of original content, is moot. Nobody else does.

Nonetheless, money has been committed to new offices in Lagos, Nairobi and Cairo, according to media statements made in early September. At the same time, local staff members were sent section 189 retrenchment notices informing them the company was financially doomed in an oversubscribed local media market that had no uptake for domestic wire copy.

In reality, it had been dealt a blow from within the Survé stable itself, as Independent Media, controlled by Survé, abruptly cancelled its subscription, resulting in a revenue loss of around R1.1 million a month. The Citizen reportedly also failed to renew its contract after ANA tried to hike its already high subscription fees.

In response, ANA staff faced with retrenchment demanded to see the company’s financials. The human resources team tasked with negotiating the layoffs happens to work for Independent Media. The team’s response was that the demand was out of order because ANA was not a public company and therefore not obliged to disclose it’s financial records.