Provincial governments may be on the verge of bypassing the IBA, reports Justin Pearce
Provincial governments, furious at being sidelined by SABC television coverage, are planning to hit back at the Auckland Park monolith.
Representatives of eight of the nine provinces met last month in Ulundi to discuss their unanimous concern that the SABC is kowtowing to central government while ignoring the work being done at provincial level.
The meeting has resulted in a discussion document which will be presented to the Premiers’ Forum — a meeting of the nine provincial leaders — later this month. While the various provinces differ on the details of what is to be done, they agree that some sort of action is necessary — be it pressuring the SABC, or setting up provincially-based public broadcasters independent of the SABC.
Raymond Louw of the Freedom of Expression Institute expressed the fear that the rumblings from the provinces represented yet another attempt by government to shoulder in on broadcasting — comparable to Deputy President Thabo Mbeki’s desire to secure airtime for the government to state its views.
But Gauteng government representative Chris Vick and North- West Public Media MEC Riani de Wet both insist that the provincial governments have no intention of assuming control over broadcasting.
The SABC’s most recent submission to the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) provides for the establishment of regional production centres and two hours a day of regionally-based transmission. But the provinces are sceptical about the SABC’s ability to reflect the interests and the needs of people in the various regions.
The nuts and bolts of provincial broadcasting have yet to be tightened. One issue is the mismatch between the Broadcasting Act, which established the IBA as a national regulator of broadcasting, and Schedule Six of the Constitution, which names provincial public media as one area where provincial governments have authority.
The Western Cape government appears to support the idea of provincial IBAs, which would govern and regulate broadcasting in each province.
Other provinces have reservations about this idea, because of the costs of duplicating structures and the complications involved in the delimitation of powers between the provincial IBAs and the existing national
Vick maintained that if the issue of provincial coverage is not resolved soon, provincial governments might succumb to the temptation of doing deals with the private sector.
He said business interests had already offered certain provinces a deal whereby the broadcaster would grant the government a specified proportion of airtime, in exchange for exclusive regional broadcasting rights in the province. The result would be a cocktail of commercial trash interspersed with PW Botha-style speeches by premiers.