By Marlan Padayachee
Durban-born Judge Navanethem Pillay will address the national editors’ forum banquet at which recipients will receive awards at the flagship Nat Nakasa Awards for excellence in journalism and media freedom at the newly-opened Radisson Blu Hotel in uMhlanga this month.
Dr Navi Pillay will take to the prestige podium on Saturday, 17 September with a high standing as a former SA judge and justice figure with the United Nations. She will focus on Media Ethics and Diversity in the Media at the South African National Editors Forum’s (SANEF) event taking place in the upmarket north Durban town.
SANEF Director Hopewell Radebe said the Nat Nakasa Awards and gala dinner – now in its 24th year – has been sponsored by life insurance corporate company, Sanlam, and will be preceded by a cocktail evening get-together of its members, sponsors and stakeholders on Friday, 16 September, at 6pm; and the council meeting the following day over the celebratory weekend that pays homage to the Durban-born journalist, Nat Nakasa.
Editors, journalists and other media industry and academic members from around the country will gather in the city for one of the highlights of SANEF’s annual programme of events. The awards are hosted annually in memory and honour of Nat Nakasa, a prominent South African journalist and writer who died in exile in New York, USA, in 1965.
‘’The Nat Nakasa Awards rank among SANEF’s flagship events. The main award is handed to an individual or a team of journalists who have shown courage and tenacity in the face of enormous challenges and displayed a commitment to serve South Africans with integrity, resisted censorship, and striven for truth and accuracy in their reporting. The second award is called the Nat Nakasa Award: Community Media, awarded to ensure that courage is highlighted within the community media sector. This award is dedicated to a community media journalist and or editor who has shown integrity and reported fearlessly, displayed a commitment to serve the people of South Africa, tenaciously striven to maintain a publication or other medium despite insurmountable obstacles, resisted any censorship and shown courage in making information available to the SA public,’’ said SANEF.
The winners are selected by a jury based on nominations submitted by the public. SANEF also uses the event to announce the recipient of the SANEF-Wrottesley Award in recognition of excellent service to the organisation and extraordinary commitment to work towards the achievement of the association’s goals. The Nat Nakasa Awards ceremony will also be live streamed.
The chief guest speak, former judge Pillay, who ran a practice with her lawyer husband, Gabby, in the Grey Street CBD in Durban in the 1980s, had set the bar high in her legal career when she was appointed as a judge in the post-democratic era. In later years, she was appointed by the United Nations to preside over human rights and genocides issues in the atrocities in Rwanda and Sri Lanka that claimed hundreds of thousands of casualties and victims in both countries that were plagued by ethnic conflict and civil wars.
- • Our group columnist, correspondent and production editor Marlan Padayachee is an associate member of SANEF, member of SAFREA and IFJ, founding executive member of MWASA, and his journalism career has straddled professional media organisations and academic institutions.
