Life has not been all rosy for the decade-old sector, which boasts about 80 stations on air
Thebe Mabanga and Jubie Matlou
‘There are many of us [refugees] living in the township. I feel that I am part of the community. For instance, more than 500 people turned up at my wedding in Nyanga township, Cape Town. I think xenophobia is mainly caused by ignorance. Once people come to know why one is a refugee … you will see xenophobia diminishing from South Africa.”
This is an excerpt of an interview from Cape Town’s Bush community radio station broadcast via a satellite link on Wednesday to mark Human Rights Day and the International Day Against Racism and Xenophobia.
The 10-minute programme captured the experience of refugees on the Cape Flats and in Nyanga and delivered it to thousands of homes in Montreal and Vienna. Other similar broadcasts in French, Portuguese and Spanish reached villages in remote corners of KwaZulu-Natal and the Northern Province.
The satellite broadcast link was organised by a group of NGOs, including the Centre for Democratic Communications (CDC), the National Community Radio Forum (NCRF), ABC-Ulwazi Radio, Vuleka Productions and the Institute for Democracy in South Africa.
Aptly dubbed Voices Without Frontiers, the 24-hour relay broadcast linked 30 South African community radio stations with sister radio stations in Lesotho, Swaziland, Zambia, Senegal and Gambia in a marathon broadcast with community stations from around the world.
Three international satellite broadcast hubs were involved, one in Johannesburg at the CDC studios, and the other two in Vienna and Montreal.
It appears that Marshall McLuhan’s clich of a global village is becoming reality. However, to use this technological breakthrough as a yardstick for measuring the state of community radio in South Africa would be misleading.
Mfundisi Mabalane, chief executive of the NCRF, notes that the sector is in a phase where capacity building is vital. The NCRF has 45 member stations, 28 of which are licensed. In partnership with the Freedom of Expression Institute, the forum has attempted to engage the government with varying degrees of success.
The problems faced by the sector affect both existing stations and initiatives to bring about new ones. They relate to programming, technical matters and legislation, such as the licensing process.
On the licensing front, the granting of the four-year community broadcasting licences has hit serious snags. About 80 radio stations are reported to be on air, some on four-year licences, and others on 12-month licences.
Of the six provinces the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) had covered for the four-year licensing process, about 38 radio stations were granted licences.
The three remaining provinces KwaZulu-Natal, Western Cape and Gauteng will be completed by the middle of next year.
Icasa councillior Libby?Lloyd cited a host of reasons for the “delay” in the licensing process.
“We had budget cuts in 1998 and a restructuring and merger process of the two authorities [Independent Broadcasting Authority and the South African Telecommunications Regulation Authority] that included staff retrenchments. These developments impacted negatively on all projects, including the community radio licensing process.”
Lloyd said a legislative provision was made in the Broadcasting Act of 1999 to fast-track the licensing process.
In the three affected provinces stations that have applied for uncontested frequencies will be granted licences without holding hearings. Where the frequencies are contested the stations concerned will be called in for hearings.
Although the arrangement will yield some returns in terms of time and costs involved, Lloyd said the council still had to deal with the time-consuming exercise of perusing transcripts from the hearings.
Lloyd dismissed claims about shortage of frequencies for the community radio sector.
“There could be a shortage of frequencies in the big cities where there are competing licence applicants, but this is not the case with the rural areas.”
A crucial feature of a radio station’s ability to cover its broadcast area with quality reception is its signal distribution. Most community radio stations use the services of Sentech, a government-owned signal-distributing company which enjoys a licensed monopoly.
Stations can also hire an experienced technician to manage signal distribution on a consultancy basis. A prohibitively costly option for stations is to distribute their own signals. The exercise involves start-up capital of between R40?000 and R60 000 and can require up to R100?000 in instances where the area is mountainous.
The NCRF has proposed identifying technically competent individuals within the sector to be trained in advanced broadcasting, who will then offer their services to their regions for a stipulated minimum period, currently three years.
In the long term this training is envisaged to be more intensive and devolved to a point where stations have individuals who meet technical requirements on site at all times, in line with the four-year license requirement.?
At an operational level, community stations’ major struggle is to get community participation. This starts at board level and filters through to daily operations, mostly on a voluntary basis. Community radio is frequently criticised for aspiring to be commercial.
This means they neglect programme requirements like providing a high proportion of local news, discussing issues that affect the community and, for black stations, using American accents without using the community’s indigenous language.
Mabalane agrees that “programming is not mission driven” but emphasises that there is not enough effort invested in training eager practitioners in areas like producing.
Icasa frequently commends community radio for adhering to the 20% local content requirement sometimes as high as 80%.
The most recent citation comes from the local content review report released last October, which informed a discussion paper released in December.
Although it is feasible to service a relatively small, geographically defined group of people with a common sense of origin and language with such high local content, industry observers note that Icasa’s pronounced satisfaction with local content is merely an attempt to mask its lackadaisical approach to monitoring both community and commercial broadcasters.
Estimates based on figures supplied by the Media Connection, a community radio ad broker, suggest that in the past year community radio attracted advertising to the value of R17-million. At the same time the South African Advertising Research Foundation estimates that three million people tune in to grassroots radio. This represents just over 11% of total radio listenership.
An initiative that is meant to bring stability to the sector is the formation of the Media Development and Diversity Agency (MDDA).
A draft paper on the MDDA was released last October and one of its tasks is to fund training and development for community radio.
In its submission on the agency, community radio has voiced a number of major objections.?
Duncan points out that a major flaw is the agency’s status. She calls for the MDDA to be enacted as a constitutional body to guarantee its independence.
Her more serious concern is the method of funding. The draft paper calls for funding to come, a third each, from government, commercial media and international donors. It calls for the Marketing Industry Trust (MIT) to channel funding for community media.
Duncan reckons this is potentially problematic. “The MIT is not a suitable conduit to fund sustainable development for community radio,” she says.
A major problem is that the MIT, which funds bodies like South African Advertising Research Foundation and the Advertising Standards Authority, has failed in an attempt to raise the members contribution from the current 1% of advertising revenue.
The members are unlikely to agree to raise contributions this time to accommodate community radio. Duncan calls for a compulsory levy on commercial broadcasters to create a development fund, because “[Commercial broadcasters] ride on the back of community media without a willingness to invest,” she says.?
The MDDA’s efforts are meant to complement an investment of more than R30-million that has gone into the sector in the past decade. This ranged from financial injection to fund training and operational costs to infrastructure support.
The Danish International Aid Agency and the Open Society Foundation have both assisted the sector from its inception. From 1998 the Department of Communications began an infrastructure roll-out of radio broadcasting equipment.
In terms of the communications department programme four radio stations in the Free State, two in the Northern Cape, two in Mpumalanga, three in the Northern Province, two in North West and another two in the Eastern Cape have received start-up broadcasting equipment.
In addition, the communications department has funded the production of radio broadcasting programmes for children, women and for the disabled.