My association with journalism dates to the mid-1980s, when I enrolled for a national diploma course in mass communication. I have been a voracious reader of several major African newspapers ever since, and my assessment is that, bar a few pockets of excellence, the standards of journalism on the continent have nosedived.

Take, for instance, Zimbabwe’s Herald national daily. It used to be a paragon of journalistic virtue, perhaps in the same league as the world’s top newspapers. Now it is a veritable rag, and you would think it is edited by apparatchiks from the governing Zanu-PF’s commissariat department. Its raison d’être seems to be spewing the party’s propaganda and ridiculing the political opposition.

Ditto the Times of Zambia and the Zambia Daily Mail. Though State controlled – just like the Herald in Zimbabwe – the newspapers used to uphold the highest standards of professionalism and had on their books some of the finest journalists from across the continent. In my view, there is very little now to recommend these publications. For the most part, the editing is sloppy and at least a few pieces in any edition are replete with schoolboy grammatical and other language usage errors.

The few bright spots include the Nation and the Standard in Kenya, as well as a few titles in Egypt, Ghana and Nigeria, such as ThisDay – it’s a pity Nduka Obaigena’s attempt to establish a South African edition, published and printed in the country, came unstuck.

South African journalism has not been immune from the general professional decadence in Africa. Take, for example, a report in a major national newspaper – published about a fortnight ago – which started thus: “An unemployed dope-smoking Rastafarian has emerged as a key source for Public Protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane’s explosive report on Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan.”

The innuendo here is that the gentleman has one or two screws loose as a result of his dope-smoking ways and whatever he says should be dismissed with contempt. As a greenhorn reporter, I was taught that only a professionally qualified person, a psychiatrist perhaps, could make such a pronouncement. When we as journalists plonk to such depths, what defence will we mount should charges of taking sides in the ongoing stand-off between Mkhwebane and Gordhan be levelled against us? I am going to think aloud now – Gordhan will in all likelihood be absolved by the courts and our blundering Public Protector will end up with egg on the face yet again. But I can only mention this in an opinion piece, and not on the hard news pages of a publication, which is what the journalist in question did.

Before the piece about the ‘dope-smoking Rastafarian’, we had the curious phenomenon of a scribe literally resorting to trash journalism. After rummaging through 14 refuse bags outside a house in Cape Town where Julius Malema and his Red Berets had been staying for eight days, the scribe wrote that she had found evidence of hypocrisy on the part of the party, which purports to be a champion for the poor. The evidence included a huge bill that had been paid for the house (she called it a villa), empty bottles of expensive liquor, et cetera.

I hold no brief for Malema – his race nationalism galls me. But, as someone correctly pointed out, did it not occur to the reporter that the 14 refuse bags could have accumulated from long before the Red Berets checked in? And why did she say the party paid R7 100 to R25 000 a day to stay at the place and then, deep in the story, that the total bill was R60 000? This works out to R7 500 a day – hardly what it would cost to stay at a villa.

Further evidence of a slide in professionalism: over a period, a national newspaper ran stories alleging malfeasance by the so-called rogue unit at the South African Revenue Service. A new editor later published a front-page mea culpa, admitting that the stories were false.

Did you wonder why I placed the word ‘profession’ in the headline in inverted commas? Given the picture painted in this piece, can we really still speak about professional journalism when it comes to some of the newspapers in Africa?