I tend to believe that The Mail & Guardian is the best newspaper in South Africa (and maybe in the entire region), both in print and online, and as my readers know, I refer to it often in my posts and commentary. But I was stricken by an example of sloppiness in this story on a poll of South Africans on the upcoming ANC confference.
Here is the lede:
The majority of South Africans prefer to have African National Congress (ANC) deputy president Jacob Zuma as their next national president, a recent TNS survey has found.
Conducted on 3 000 adults between September and October, the survey saw Zuma emerge as frontrunner to succeed Thabo Mbeki when he steps down in 2009.
Well, that seems compelling enough. Whatever my qualms with Zuma, and I have more than my share, I believe in democratic processes, and while there may be shenanigans in the process, I have seen no signs that South Africa's democracy qua democracy is failing its people. (In other words, I expect the 2009 elections to go forward cleanly, without violence or corruption. Maybe I’m naive, but so far South Africa's elections have been a model for the continent.)
But then we have the following paragraph:
Responding to the survey's question on who they would want to become the country's president when Mbeki's term comes to an end, 36% of the participants felt that Zuma should be the country's next president.
36% is not a majority. It represents a plurality. And given that the ongoing narrative in South African politics, a narrative that comes largely from the media, in which the race has long been presented as a battle between Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma, 36% is hardly even an overwhelming plurality. Maybe I am nitpicking, but it seems to me that a poll of 3000 South Africans in which just over 1000 name Jacob Zuma as their first choice for the presidency hardly seems to indicate what the majority of South Africans really may feel. In part this may reflect the limitations of polling. But to a far larger degree it represents a fundamental failure on the part of SAPA and The Mail & Guardian accurately to convey what these poll results mean.