Namibian President Sam Nujoma has ordered the state broadcaster to immediately stop playing all foreign television programs, saying they are corrupting the nation’s youth, a local newspaper reported on Tuesday.
Nujoma, who has claimed foreigners were spreading homosexuality in his southern African country, told officials at the Namibian Broadcasting Corporation on Monday afternoon to drop Western programs and instead broadcast locally made shows that portray Namibia in a positive light, The Namibian newspaper reported.
The television station immediately began revising its schedule and confused staff members started pulling old tapes off the shelves almost at random to fill airtime, the newspaper said.
The US soap opera ”The Bold and the Beautiful” was dropped and the science fiction miniseries ”Dune” was replaced by a program on the recent ruling party congress.
Several viewers called the station to complain about the changes, the newspaper reported. Government?s representative Mocks Shivute said Nujoma did not intend to ban all foreign shows. He just wanted those containing sex and violence to be broadcast later in the night, when children were less likely to see them.
”Basically what he said was that NBC should reprioritise the screening times of foreign films because most of them don’t add value to the Namibian culture and they are shown at wrong times,” he said on Tuesday.
But station officials gave a different account of the meeting and said they were worried the tiny country of less than two-million people did not have enough local programs to fill the schedule.
According to staff members at the meeting, Nujoma, who is also information minister, told workers they would be fired if they broadcast any more sex or violence and he condemned all foreign programs, The Namibian reported.
When one staff member, a white woman who moved to Namibia nearly three decades ago, protested that not all European values were bad, Nujoma accused her of having ”a British colonial mentality” and asked her why she was ”keeping the good things to yourself and showing us lesbianism?” a staff member at the meeting told the newspaper.
In recent years Nujoma, who led the country to independence in 1990, has been accused of making provocative comments. He has threatened to arrest and deport homosexuals and promised to ban gay tourists. He has referred to Aids as a man-made biological weapon. In a recent speech at the World Summit in South Africa he told foreign donors he did not want their aid. – Sapa-AP