The alleged blacklisting by the state broadcaster, the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), was an ”internal matter”, the South African Cabinet said on Thursday.
In a statement released after the regular Cabinet meeting held in Pretoria on Wednesday, it said: ”With regard to the allegations that the SABC had excluded certain commentators from its airwaves, Cabinet took the view that this is an internal matter and expressed its confidence in the capacity of the public broadcaster to address the matter in terms of its mandate.”
The SABC appointed a commission of inquiry into the allegations that a number of commentators including Business Day‘s Karima Brown and author William Mervin Gumede had been ”banned”.
Parastatal land disposal
Meanwhile, the Cabinet held a discussion on appropriate measures needed to meet black economic empowerment (BEE) objectives in the process of parastatals’ disposal of land.
In a statement it said Public Enterprises Minister Alec Erwin had led the discussion. It reported that a number of parastatals — which the government calls State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) — had finalised and others were finalising plans for the disposal of ”non-core assets”.
While the Cabinet statement did not divulge the details of the mechanisms in detail, it said guidelines would be ”published shortly”.
These would ensure a coherent approach across the different public enterprises reporting to the department of public enterprises, it reported. There would be a ”clear set of empowerment criteria to the market” and mechanisms for setting and achieving empowerment targets through disposal of SOE non-core properties.
Polio outbreak in Namibia
The Cabinet was also briefed on an outbreak of polio in the neighbouring state of Namibia. The briefing by Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang noted that South Africa had been successful in the eradication of polio within its borders ”but took the view that although no cases have been reported in the country for the past 15 years, we can not afford to be complacent”.
The South African government had been assisting the Namibian government in dealing with the outbreak ”amongst others through provision of laboratory test services and vaccine cooler boxes”.
The Cabinet had commended the South African and Namibian ministries of health ”for their speedy intervention”.
Cabinet welcomes historic DRC poll
The Cabinet welcomed the upcoming elections to be held in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) on July 30.
In a statement it said the elections represented for the Congolese ”what our 1994 elections represented for us and mark the culmination of over ten years of effort by the people of the DRC”.
It noted that South Africa’s Independent Electoral Commission, together with a number of South African institutions and companies had been providing different kinds of assistance and support.
The Cabinet expressed its gratitude to all the South Africans who had been ”and those who still are participating in this historic process”. – I-Net Bridge.