Is the End of Independent Media Imminent?

Sekunjalo boss, Dr Iqbal Surve, who is also an ANC and WEF crony, bought Independent Media in 2013 when the Irish magnate O’Reilly sold it for some R2 billion. From the outset, Surve launched a piecemeal purge of mostly white journalists from the stable of legacy newspapers – The Star, Pretoria News, The Mercury, Daily News, Cape Times, The Argus, Sunday Tribune.

Within four years, by the end of 2017, Independent Media had accumulated losses amounting to R752 million and liabilities amounting to R547 million. It owed R909,45 million to the China-Africa Development Fund, R662,72 million to the Government Employees Pension Fund, and R243,98 million to the Sactwu trade union.

To service this gargantuan debt, Surve intended to fold the newspaper assets into a new company to be listed on the JSE and thereby (hopefully) raise enough money through the market to pay down the debt. The new company was his Sagarmatha Technologies, which was introduced to readers in March 2018 as “the next emerging market technology platform for Africans.”

Its 208-page pre-listing statement announced that Sagarmatha planned to raise to R7,5 billion through private placement of 190 million shares at R39.62 per share. Beefing up the rosy blurb, Sagarmatha expressed intentions to get involved in drones, blockchain technology, film and media houses in East and West Africa. But then Surve ran into the reality of JSE rules.

In order to list, the JSE required financial statements for the year to 31 December 2017. That’s when the declining revenues, finance costs and falling circulation of the press stable became public knowledge. The reception of his intentions was decidedly sceptical. Business Day of April 3, 2018 stated: “Iqbal Surve has swept together a collection of insolvent, unprofitable media-related assets.” Comment elsewhere was derisive: why would anyone want to buy into a loss-making, deeply indebted company whose liabilities exceeded its assets?

So the listing date of April 12 was postponed. Disingenuously, Surve cited technicalities and the “large-scale disinformation campaign by competitors.” Unabashed, he ranked Sagermatha alongside Uber, Amazon, Alibaba and DN Chang as companies which also showed substantial losses but “whose values were highly valued by capital markets.” Pioneering moves, he contended, often encountered   “misunderstanding and unfamiliarity” which detracted from the “greater picture Sagarmatha  Technologies represents.”

In support of his stance, Surve insisted that Independent Media was ahead in its scheduled repayment of loans and would have settled 50% of them by August 2018. At the same time, he blamed “white-owned” media companies for trying to keep “black-owned” competitors out of the market. But the inaccuracy of  Surve’s claims was revealed in December 2018 when the Public Investment Corporation (PIC) wrote off R1.06 billion in loans to Sekunjalo and Independent.

Bereft of his much-vaunted JSE listing, Independent’s fortunes were not served by Surve’s arrogant management and the infused ANC bias of its contents. Polemical content and embrace of far-Left ideology hastened the decline in reader subscriptions, which, in turn, sharply reduced advertising, resulting in fewer and fewer printed pages in daily editions.

Having run out of road, on 31 July 2026, Surve dumped the Independent stable into a new group called National Media Group – with no assets. Then on August 7, he brazenly claimed he was exploring all legal and commercial avenues to recover his multi-billion investment in Independent and would liquidate it if necessary.

He must think the business world suffers from amnesia because the bulk of the money to buy Independent was loaned from the PIC, which in 2018 wrote off the R1,06 billion Independent owed to it.

The demise of newspapers, some of which were founded over 150 years ago, thanks to an individual who prioritized racial, ideological transformation over economic realities, is just the latest in the destruction of another aspect of what was once a functioning country.

[details from: Paper Tiger: Iqbal Surve and the downfall of Independent Newspapers by Alide Dasnois and Chris Whitfield, (Tafelberg, Cape Town, 2019)]