Zwelakhe Sisulu’s media experience is a matter of public record. The youngest son of struggle icon Walter, he began his journalism career as a Rand Daily Mail cadet in 1976. In the ’80s he founded the authoritative anti-apartheid weekly New Nation and was arrested and detained for lengthy periods under the Internal Security Act. In 1994, under a new dispensation, he was appointed chief executive of the SABC. Four years later he left the broadcaster to join New Africa Investments Limited (Nail) as joint deputy chairman, with responsibility for the company’s media and IT interests.
While the earlier years bear indisputable testimony to brave and important journalism in the harshest conditions, the record of the last decade is not uncontested. Many would agree with the assessment of Allister Sparks that Sisulu’s tenure at the SABC was a “Prague Spring” – a brief interlude when the broadcaster put out independent, world-class editorial – but an equal number will remember the commercial problems. Sisulu did, after all, appear before a parliamentary committee on charges of excessive spending in his quest to transform the organisation.
Nail, despite some successes with cash-generative radio assets, had its own financial difficulties. The company was described in the business press as more of a cash shell than a media giant, with R600-million lying unused in the coffers at one point and a share price trading at a big discount to its net asset value. The conglomerate has since been unbundled, with the bulk of the holdings now in the hands of Johncom, Primedia and Kagiso Media.
Still, however Sisulu’s achievements are interpreted, experience at this level can’t be bought. With his next venture, he will need to draw on the full range of his thirty years in the industry. Sisulu has retained a portion of Nail’s smaller assets and bought into others, and with them he intends to grow a pan-African media presence.
“When I left Nail I took a strategic decision to build a profile on the continent rather than South Africa, as I thought the South African market was overcrowded,” he explains. “My strategy is to identify quality assets in South Africa with the purpose of leveraging them across the continent.”
These assets currently include a 51 percent stake in Outdoor Network and Nail Outdoor Africa (which operates in Nigeria, Ghana and the DRC), a fifty percent stake in TV production company Urban Brew, 90 percent of New Africa Books (formerly Nail’s book publishing subsidiary) and 25 percent of PAMI (Pan Africa Media Investments).
The PAMI stake is a collaboration with African Extension, a continental media agency with head offices in South Africa. The holdings include planning and buying operations in 10 sub-Saharan African countries and web-based technology that offers the largest single entry-point into cross-continent media schedules – with over 1,000 media brands on the database, the technology plans and books schedules, monitors order trails, and analyses competitor client spend.
“A number of things are obvious in Africa right now,” says Sisulu. “What is lacking is infrastructure, and that also applies to technological infrastructure. So I’ve invested in PAMI as a standalone, but also as a service provider to my other businesses.”
Clearly, the broader infrastructural problems don’t detract from Sisulu’s confidence in the continent. “There is no question that Africa is a growth market. Its consumer sophistication is growing in leaps and bounds. When Africans in Johannesburg or Europe or America come back home, they bring the latest technologies and goods with them. The end of the debt crisis has also released money and disposable cash, the mindset has changed from a begging bowl to a serious market.”
While he admits it’s a long way off, Sisulu’s ultimate ambition is to tap into this growth and create “a significant TV platform” that offers a range of content options to African TV markets. “Local partners are key to our business models,” he says. “We are looking initially at the DRC, East Africa and Nigeria.”
But similar pan-African content provision businesses have failed dismally before, most notably TV Africa. As The Media wrote in February 2004, TV Africa’s application for liquidation signaled the end of a US$57-million disaster (controversially funded in part by the World Bank’s IFC). Notwithstanding the management fiasco, the company’s major problem was that it could not deliver on its flighting guarantees, and thus could not bill clients.
“[TV Africa’s] affiliates would resell sponsorship packages and earn local revenue in their own countries,” Clive Kemp, chief executive of African Extension, told The Media at the time. “[During one sporting event] there were eight logos on the screen. There are serious control issues on how you stop that.”
Of course one advantage Sisulu has is that Kemp, who was commissioned to track the flightings for TV Africa and knows the problem intimately, is now his partner. So how will this initiative be different?
“There is a reliable research base,” says Sisulu. “We will know these markets. There will also be an accounting protocol. If we say we will flight a commercial at a certain time, you will be able to check it. I don’t mean to knock TV Africa, but sometimes as a pioneer you pay a price. You’ve got to properly research your market, everything will not be fine.”
Sisulu adds that following the TV Africa debacle local content quotas were implemented across a number of African markets, so he plans to provide specially developed “social and educational” content that will accommodate the regulations. “I am committed to doing this from a Nepad social development perspective,” he says.
By all accounts, such a model should be better received than the obsolete Dynasty-type programming TV Africa foisted on their erstwhile affiliates. And with his current range of assets providing support, full access to the continent-wide relationships of African Extension, and a lifetime of media experience to draw on, Sisulu’s African TV dream may well turn out not to be all that far-fetched.