Ferial Haffajee
A concerted effort to Africanise the leadership of SABC television news for the first time has sown tension in the country’s largest and most powerful newsroom.
The installation of a new guard, led by journalists Phil Molefe and Snuki Zikalala, coincides with allegations that TV news coverage is growing increasingly establishment.
Radical change has come to the SABC since former editor-in-chief Allister Sparks left at the end of last year. Together with the new guard, the entire news structure has changed.
It is the third time in the past five years that power has changed hands at TV news. Big names in journalism, like Sparks, the late Ameen Akhalwaya, Joe Thloloe, Jill Chisholm and Sarah Crowe, have fallen victim to the highly contested terrain where transformation is still not fully complete.
Editor-in-chief Molefe’s lieutenants include Zikalala, who is his deputy, and long-time SABC staffer Themba Mthembu, who is the most recent head of news and current affairs.
Other top news positions, like those of the political editor and the head of current affairs, are also likely to go to black incumbents.
Says Molefe: “No one in this place has been discriminated against on the basis of colour. [But] the historical imbalances must be addressed.”
He adds that many black journalists who have been working at the SABC for a long time have been overlooked for promotion and he stresses that his task is to make television a “reflection of South Africa and its democratic values”. Consequently, there is also a greater effort to find black political and economic analysts.
The dictates of affirmative action are never without casualties. Insiders report that white staff feel nervous. One said: “They have racialised the SABC overnight. There are no whites of significance left in the place.”
To which Molefe replies that he does have white editors and producers in his employ.