Jacquie Golding-Duffy
Parliament recently had the nominations for the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) councillors’ posts, bar one, thrown out.
The nomination which was accepted and approved by the chief whip of the African National Congress was that of Lyndall Shope-Mafole. Shope-Mafole will have her contract renewed as she is already an IBA councillor.
The other three nominations by the Portfolio Committee on Communications — Pietie Lotriet, former head of SABC commercial radio; Raymond Louw, a media task group member and chairman of the Freedom of Expression Institute; and Maishe Maponya, a drama lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand — were not approved by parliament.
These three nominees will be referred back to the committee for the purpose of review and special attention given to the IBA Act of 1993. The Portfolio Committee has to replace advertisements in all the newspapers and start the selection process again.
Insiders say there are a lot of rumblings by various political parties who are unhappy that the nominations were disapproved.
Some say the reasons may be that Lotriet and Louw are both white and that parliament is forced to make the upper echelons of the IBA more representative of the country, while others say that the nominees may not have the right qualifications.
Either way, the Portfolio Committee on Communications has its work cut out for it because Parliament wants the process of selection completed as soon as possible and with chairperson Saci Macozoma leaving in mid- April to take up a job in the private sector, a new chair has to be found and the nominations finalised.