Sandile Ngidi
The Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) and the National Community Radio Forum (NCRF) are close to sealing a deal to enhance the sustainable growth of community radio in South Africa.
At the heart of the agreement is a proposal that the NCRF takes management control of Cosatu’s financially embattled Campaign for Democratic Communications (CDC), keep the campaign’s labour focus, improve financial control systems and reposition the project as a critical resource for the country’s community radio stations.
For the past 15 months the NCRF, which represents 52 community radio stations, has been talking with the country’s biggest trade union federation in an attempt to salvage the CDC until last year, a major player and service provider for local community radio.
The CDC currently operates under the Cosatu-initiated, but operationally defunct, Democratic Media Trust. Cosatu spokesman Patrick Craven has confirmed that the trust has not met for “many years” but cannot remember when last it did meet. High-profile political figures, including South African Communist Party secretary general Blade Nzimande, African National Congress MP Pallo Jordaan and Gauteng Premier Mbazima Shilowa, have served on the trust.
One of the issues before Cosatu is a proposal for the trust to be wound up and its assets and liabilities transferred to Cosatu. The CDC’s video stock and radio property have already been transferred to Cosatu under a contract signed in June 2000 by the labour federation and Italy’s Progetto Sviluppo CGIL, the main funder of the trust.
NCRF CEO Mfundisi Mabalane says his organisation has commissioned a feasibility study to help achieve “a sustainable community radio environment” for the country’s airwaves. Formed in Orlando, Soweto, in 1993, the NCRF includes among its aims lobbying for the diversification of the airwaves and spearheading and supporting the birth of community radio stations. “Like the ANC, we are a broad church.”
Cosatu, its alliance partners and the NCRF formed the CDC in the early 1990s to create a pivotal empowering vehicle for community radio stations through technical training, staff training and content sharing.
Towards the end of last year, however, the project’s content-sharing vehicle the South African Community Radio Network, commonly known as Sacrin was terminated because the CDC could no longer afford to pay the R35 000 monthly bill to public signal distributor Sentech, said director Mervyn Swartz. Sentech’s Albert Koffeman confirmed the monthly rental.
The woes of the Cosatu project are not new, says Mabalane. He believes both the CDC and the NCRF are partially to blame.
“There was a lot of excitement when we started, but planning was poor from all of us. We got content right in most cases, but we did very little to consider what would happen next. A lot was done in a haphazard manner.”
Mabalane says the NCRF’s new proposal to Cosatu will not dilute the trade federation’s vision to profile labour issues in community radio programming but will merely enhance it and ensure its sustainability. Neither will the NCRF assume the ownership of the CDC’s resources.
As early as last October, together with Cape Town-based Workers World Radio Productions, the NCRF has been providing programmes on labour issues to at least 20 community radio stations and the SABC’s Xhosa language station Umhlobo Wenene.
The initiative is said to enjoy the support of various affiliates of both Cosatu and the National African Confederation of Trade Unions (Nactu).
Topics that have been discussed to date include racism, privatisation and unemployment.
It is partly the NCRF’s history of promoting labour issues that make the forum confident that its proposal to Cosatu will win the day.
Craven was, however, cautious this week. He said the NCRF was among “some parties” Cosatu was talking to on the future of CDC. He refused to name the other parties involved in talks.
Mabalane is confident that once the CDC’s future has been decided and the NCRF’s feasibility study completed expected by the end of March the NCRF will be in a better position to steer South Africa’s community radio into a solid future.
“We are passing through the learning phase,” he says. He adds that given that community radio is only seven years old in the country, its current wave of problems are not insurmountable.
“Latin America is still facing similar problems 30 years after starting community radio stations.”
Although Sacrin is not about to be revived yet, what is important for Mabalane is that the NCRF has learnt lessons from the current problems faced by the local community radio fraternity. These lessons will also feature prominently at the NCRF’s annual congress in June.
Even in terms of content, the NCRF is now moving away from providing content from Braamfontein to the stations. Rather, it is planning to enhance the capacity of community radio stations to package their own local content and bring content to a bigger pool for sharing, if necessary.
“Our role is that of a middle man; community control remains one of the core defining features of community radio. For cost-cutting we also want to use satellite facilities only when we see the need,” he says. At present Sentech charges each community radio station R8 000 a month for a full service that includes equipment and a mast.
To address the challenges of the digital divide, Mabalane says the NCRF’s priority is to help community radio stations “understand the divide”. In line with this, one of the NCRF’s main projects for this year is ensuring that its recently set up information and communications technology development department is fully functional.