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The night Nelson Mandela died

At about 11.45 on the night of 5 December 2013, President Jacob Zuma addressed the nation on television. The staff in the Cape Times newsroom stood in silence as he announced the news the whole country had been dreading: Nelson Mandela is dead. Then everyone leapt to work.

Both the Cape Times and the Cape Argus newsrooms, on the fourth floor of Newspaper House in central Cape Town, were already buzzing. Senior staffers on both newspapers had heard rumours of Mandela’s death during a dinner at the Vineyard Hotel in Newlands with the new owner of Independent Newspapers, Iqbal Survé, and had immediately left to rush to their newsrooms. The regular night shift had been joined by other staffers from the day shifts who had returned to work, knowing they would be needed and anxious to be part of a historic edition of their papers.

Staff on both papers had prepared carefully for this day. Special front pages had been designed; significant photographs had been selected; graphics had been prepared; tributes had been written and edited. But there was still the news of the death to process, reaction to collect, photographs to find, and decisions to be taken about how best to cover an event which would make headlines all over the world.

In planning meetings held as the former President’s health deteriorated, the Cape Times team had agreed that if Mandela died during the day, the whole of the next day’s paper – or most of it – would be devoted to him. But if he died at night, close to the newspaper’s deadline, and there was no time to remake the newspaper, the time-honoured solution of the four-page ‘wrap-around’ would be used. The team would create a new edition, with a front page, a back page and two inside pages, into which the old edition would be folded.

On the night of 5 December editor Alide Dasnois phoned the printers in Epping to warn them four new pages were coming. ‘Get them to us by 1a.m. at the latest,’ the print chief told her.

There was a brief panic when the production team could not find the special front page which had been designed by sub-editor Lance Cherry, with a full-page black-and-white picture of Mandela. Someone telephoned Independent Newspapers’ production editor Dave Chambers, who found it hidden in a corner of the virtual system. So far so good. Veteran sub-editor Mike Stent got going with page four – the back page – which contained tributes from former Presidents Thabo Mbeki and FW de Klerk. Graphic artist Boetie Jacobs put the finishing touches to a timeline he’d designed to run across the bottom of the two inside pages. Head of news Janet Heard and news editor A’Eysha Kassiem, who had rushed back from the Vineyard Hotel dinner, collected copy and photographs for the two news pages, together with assistant editor Tony Weaver. Glenn Bownes, the chief sub-editor, was scouring the news agency wires. ‘We had been on Mandela alert for some months, with it becoming increasingly clear that the great man was nearing the end of his life,’ says Bownes. ‘Obits had been written, various pieces and pictures saved, and we had prepped a front page for when the sad, but inevitable, day arrived.’

In her office, Dasnois made a few last-minute changes to the page-three editorial she’d prepared and then crossed the newsroom to help the production team, proofreading pages, changing headlines, reading wires and discussing developments with the news staff, including night news editor Aneez Salie. There were posters to write and captions to check before the pages could be sent off, one by one, to the printers.

Chris Whitfield, editor-in-chief of Independent Newspapers Cape, was in his office between the two newsrooms after heading back from the dinner at the Vineyard. Also there was Karima Brown, who only days previously had been announced as the new group executive editor. Whitfield was uncertain what impact this appointment would have on his status – until then he had been the most senior editor in the company and responsible for co-ordinating group projects – but he put that concern aside as the news teams knuckled down to producing a newspaper to mark the momentous occasion.

Brown joined the Cape Argus planning conference and sketched her idea for the front page, a picture of Mandela with the words Hamba Kahle (Go well) above it. Whitfield was dismayed. The phrase had been used so many times in headlines by then – it was dusted off every time some dignitary died. Surely the paper could do better? He went to Cape Argus editor Jermaine Craig afterwards and suggested his team look for a more creative solution.

Then Brown sat down at the telephone on the Cape Times newsdesk – in the heart of the Cape Times production team – where, Janet Heard remembers, the Johannesburg-based executive spent much of her time changing her air tickets for the next day.

Meanwhile, the atmosphere in the Cape Times newsroom was ‘crazy’, says Heard. ‘At some stage, Alide called us around and said we would keep the main paper as is, due to deadline pressures, but we would do a special wraparound tribute containing the planned tribute cover, Mbeki’s tribute back page, a timeline by Boetie, and all the hard news of the drama and tributes on pages two and three. I remember thinking we should change the front page, but there was no dissent, no discussion, time was not on our side, we had to act quickly. The final page deadline was set. We had no time to debate or argue.’

Glenn Bownes, concerned that there was no time to remake the paper completely, agreed with Dasnois that a special wraparound four-page edition would be the best bet. ‘As we started putting together pages, it became clear that stripping the front page (and at least four other pages inside), and the knock-on effect of that, would make us very late for the presses and the trucks that needed to deliver the paper. As chief-sub, I felt strongly that a wraparound would be the best approach – both from a deadline perspective and because it would make for a more powerful tribute edition.’

Heard cobbled together a lead story for page two, adding in Zuma’s comments, copy from sister newspaper The Star, copy from the wires, the announcement that the national flag would fly at half mast, and accounts of scenes outside Mandela’s Johannesburg house. Night reporter Xolani Koyana called around for tributes. They poured in by email. News editor Kassiem got African National Congress comment while Cape Town mayor Patricia de Lille, Western Cape premier Helen Zille, struggle veteran Ahmed Kathrada, the National Union of Mineworkers, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu all made statements.

‘It rolled in. We were running out of time. We took the De Klerk tribute off the story to run separately on the back page with Mbeki. Tony [Weaver] pulled this together. He put together the CV on page three too,’ says Heard. ‘At one point tears poured down my face, just momentarily as I realised the weight of what was going on – that Mandela was no more.

‘It all came together, we got off stone, we all proofed the pages till about 2a.m. Tony pulled out the whisky found in Alide’s office, we drank out of polystyrene cups. I drove home feeling amazed. History. Incredible to be part of it. Proud. I sent one tweet on my own timeline. I got home to my husband Steve, and said we had done a great job.’

The first edition of the newspaper, which had a 9p.m. deadline, had already been printed and sent off on trucks for delivery through the night to homes and outlets in far-flung towns across the Western Cape. The front-page lead in that edition was a careful report by environment reporter Melanie Gosling about the findings of the Public Protector, Thuli Madonsela, on a fish monitoring contract awarded by the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries. The R800 million tender for the management of the country’s fisheries research and patrol vessels had already had a stormy history. Four of the six short-listed bidders were closely related to a single parent company, Sekunjalo Investments. One of the others was the current holder of the tender, Smit Amandla Marine.

On 24 November 2011, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Minister Tina Joemat-Pettersson announced that the tender had been awarded to Sekunjalo Marine Services Consortium (SMSC), one of the four bidders linked to Sekunjalo.

Smit Amandla promptly launched a court challenge to set the award aside, alleging irregularities in the process and possible collusion by the four Sekunjalo-linked bidders. Smit Amandla and Democratic Alliance (DA) MP Pieter van Dalen also asked the Public Protector to investigate.

In February 2012, Sekunjalo Investments chief executive officer Khalid Abdulla informed the department that Sekunjalo would not fight Smit Amandla in court and would withdraw from the tender, which was then cancelled by the department. The fish monitoring process was handed over to the South African Navy.

But Madonsela continued her investigation, and the report she released on 5 December 2013 was explosive. Madonsela found that the award of the contract to SMSC to manage the department’s fleet of research and patrol boats was ‘improper’. Acting Fisheries director Joseph Sebola had given Sekunjalo top marks of 5/5 during the tender evaluation process while scoring rival bidder Smit Amandla, which had ten years of appropriate experience, 1/5 – behaviour which the Public Protector described as ‘irrational, subjective and biased’.

Madonsela said Joemat-Pettersson had interfered with her investigation by trying to get Justice Minister Jeff Radebe to call off the probe. In Joemat-Pettersson’s opinion, the probe was ‘unnecessary’ since the Sekunjalo contract had by then been withdrawn.

Madonsela also found that giving the patrol vessels tender to a Sekunjalo company while its subsidiary Premier Fishing had fishing rights put Sekunjalo in the position of ‘referee and player’. She referred this issue to the Competition Commission for further investigation, but recommended that President Jacob Zuma take disciplinary action against Joemat-Pettersson for her ‘reckless dealing with state money and services, resulting in fruitless and wasteful expenditure, loss of confidence in the fisheries industry in South Africa, alleged decimation of fisheries resources in South Africa and delayed quota allocations due to lack of appropriate research’. Madonsela wrote: ‘How this company even got beyond the clerical point of bid checking … is totally perplexing.’ She found the Fisheries Minister guilty of maladministration, unethical conduct, wasteful expenditure and ‘reckless dealing with state money’.

By any standards this was a big story, and the Cape Times led its early edition with Gosling’s report under the headline ‘Protector lays down law – Zuma “should take action against fisheries minister”’ and included a picture of Joemat-Pettersson.

Independent Newspapers’ new proprietor Iqbal Survé was also chairman of Sekunjalo. ‘It was not lost on anyone in the newsrooms that by covering this story, we would be writing about our new owners, and about their apparent involvement in a questionable deal,’ says Gosling. ‘I remember feeling slightly nervous about that. Iqbal Survé was new to us and we did not know what to expect. At the same time there was no doubt in my mind that the story had to be covered, in the same way that we would cover any other company involved in a similar case.’

Working first from her notes from a television broadcast about the report, and later from the full published report when it was emailed to the media, Gosling wrote her story. That story was to cost Alide Dasnois her job.