In his response to a question about the challenges associated with being head of news at the public broadcaster, Snuki Zikalala, then head of news at the SABC, told the gathering of government communicators and journalists that every night, when the clock struck seven, he switched off his phone.

I had deliberately posed this question to Zikalala, who was regarded as being close to Thabo Mbeki, during his tenure as the ANC and the country’s president at the Gauteng provincial government Communicators’ Forum Media Networking Session aimed at building relations between government communicators and journalists...