Despots and spin doctors: collapse of a PR firm

If an autopsy could have been performed on Bell Pottinger, Britain's most audacious public relations firm, the cause of death may have been summarised as "acute embarrassment."

This is ironic because Bell Pottinger always seemed defiantly beyond shame. During its 30 years in the upper echelons of Britain's spin doctoring game, it sought to polish the image of dictators (Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus), repressive regimes (Bahrain and Egypt, to name two) and celebrities accused of despicable crimes (the Olympic runner Oscar Pistorius after he was charged with murder).

But in early 2016, Bell Pottinger signed a client that ultimately buried it in disgrace. The company worked for the Guptas, three brothers from India who built a sprawling, multibillion-dollar corporate empire in South Africa.

Ajay, Tony and Atul Gupta had earned fantastic sums leveraging their friendship with President Jacob G Zuma. By bullying officials and bending regulations to their will, they secured contracts in fields as varied as armaments, mining and railways. They offered ministerial jobs to politicians of their choosing. The Guptas and Zuma were so intertwined that critics had taken to referring to the "Zupta regime."

As the power of the Guptas and their holding company, Oakbay Investments, gained attention, the family wanted the public relations equivalent of a stun grenade - a distraction that would draw attention from them and onto their many enemies. So Bell Pottinger was retained, and given an assignment that initially sounded benign enough: grassroots political activism intended to help poor blacks.

By the following year, Bell Pottinger was embroiled in a national maelstrom. In TV reports, editorials and public rallies, it stood accused of setting off racial tensions through a furtive campaign built on Twitter bots, hate-filled websites and speeches. All were pushing a highly toxic narrative, namely that whites in South Africa had seized resources and wealth while they deprived blacks of education and jobs. The message was popularised with an incendiary phrase, "white monopoly capital."

How Bell Pottinger went bankrupt is a tale of corporate skulduggery that seems lifted from "House of Cards," the PR edition. During the Gupta disaster, a vicious boardroom struggle unfolded, one that pitted a co-founder, Tim Bell, against James Henderson, who ran the firm in the years before it went under. Their conflict centred on the perennials of business potboilers, namely power and money.

The story is also an inside look at the tormen ­ted state of politics in South Africa. Allegations of Gupta-related corruption surfaced gradually over the years, as officials and the media described how this once unknown family was ransacking South Africa and its institutions. Zuma has since been swept up by investigations into the brothers amid an outcry that he let them hijack the government in a textbook example of "state capture." With the economy sputtering, Zuma's own party has called for his ouster.

The scandal has engulfed the nation. Zuma is a member of the ANC, the party of Nelson Mandela and post-apartheid comity. His alliance with the Guptas, and their exploitation of racial animosity, has underscored just how far the party has wandered from its roots after winning its first election in 1994.

The Guptas' most devastating legacy is the harm they did to the cause of economic reform. With so many blacks in South Africa mired in poverty, the topic is urgent, but discussion about it has been debased by its association with a notorious and self-serving PR campaign.

In the midst of that campaign, racial tensions rose to levels that had not been felt since apartheid. "White monopoly capital," a phrase that for years had been confined to left-wing academic circles, was suddenly unavoidable. A political group with reported links to the Guptas warned of a coming civil war.

When Bell Pottinger's role became public, protesters rallied against the company, in South Africa and outside its London office. A subsequent investigation by the Public Relations and Communications Association, a trade group in Britain, ended with the ejection of the firm.

Bell Pottinger's slide into oblivion began with a visit to the Guptas in January 2016. Bell, who had worked in South Africa for years, said he had no idea what the brothers wanted, but he and several colleagues flew to Johannesburg to find out.

The family already had a fortune, Tony Gupta told the small entourage. Now, he and his brothers wanted to help poor blacks. To that end, they wanted a PR campaign that pushed the idea of economic emancipation.

Sparking racial conflict

The company drafted a two-page proposal, a copy of which was reviewed by The New York Times. Among its recommendations was "a non-party political narrative around the existence of economic apartheid" that Bell Pottinger would package "into speeches, news releases, website content, videos/broadcast content, slogans and other material required."

Soon, the Guptas said their company needed communications help, too. Most South Africans,
they maintained, had an inflated notion of how much of the family's revenue came from government contracts, which harmed their interests, several Bell Pottinger employees recalled.

The PR campaign in South Africa, which started in 2016, was intended to raise the temperature of race relations. And it worked. As the campaign spread, leaders at groups like the ANC Youth League gave inflammatory speeches, decrying the "stranglehold" that rich whites had on the economy. Leaked emails would later show that the groups received media training, and in some cases funds, from Oakbay.

In a related and surreptitious campaign, the Guptas were being recast as warmhearted people eager to help the downtrodden. A website connected to Black First Land First ran editorials defending the brothers, suggesting in one that they should be "praised for saving jobs."

Bell Pottinger's work for the Guptas was not widely known until November 2016, when a video interview of Ajay Gupta, arranged by the company, leaked to the media. The content of the interview was largely banal. It was proof, though, that one of Britain's most famous PR firms was helping the brothers.

Bell Pottinger's links to the Guptas went full-on radioactive in March, when a mysterious 21-page report was posted on the website of the South African Communist Party. Written anonymously and without any cited sources, the report laid out the history of Bell Pottinger's work for the Guptas, tagging the firm as the brains behind Twitter hashtags, such as #HandsofftheGuptas, and an array of bogus social media accounts. In April, Bell Pottinger cancelled its deal with the Guptas. It did not help.

The Gupta-Bell Pottinger campaign backfired on just about everyone, especially the Guptas. In an August statement, the brothers said they intended to sell all of their South African holdings by the end of 2017.

But arguably the greatest casualty of the Gupta-Bell Pottinger campaign is the very cause it nominally championed, helping impoverished blacks. Like most propaganda, the ideas promoted by the Guptas contained kernels of truth. The economic advancement of blacks postapartheid has indeed been painfully slow.

"The damage done by this campaign is not over," said Sipho Pityana, a businessman who headed Department of Labour under the Mandela administration. "It shapes the discourse about inequality in South Africa to this day."