There was an extraordinary claiming of public media space in February when hundreds of radio listeners placed an advertisement in the Mail & Guardian, lamenting the exit of broadcaster John Perlman from the helm of AM-Live.
They thanked him for hours of riveting radio and protested what his exit symbolised: the steady erosion of public broadcasting values at the SABC.
As I read it, I could imagine the broadcaster’s stewards tallying the petitioners by race, for such is their wont. “Aaah,” they may have said, “it’s mostly whites”,—and then toss it in the dustbin, consoling themselves that they are still the biggest broadcaster on the continent with good listening and viewership figures.
The SABC CEO Dali Mpofu and the managing director of news and current affairs, Snuki Zikalala, have both identified their detractors as “liberals” who are anti-establishment and on the attack against the institution’s black leadership.
Our mandarins at Auckland Park should resist the urge to view things through only a racial prism. The petitioners were a non-racial grouping of people united by values and not by race. That is the vision of our constitution and the protest was a seminal moment.
The SABC is ours and it is being poorly run. We should make our voices heard when the new board is appointed in 2008 and insist on packing it with people who share the values contained in the institution’s own editorial charter.
After almost a decade on radio, Perlman found the public radio voice. As Peter Bruce wrote in a column at the beginning of March: “The point John Perlman taught us about journalism is that while it’s imperative to be polite, it’s fatal to be deferential—
“Perhaps Perlman’s problem at the SABC was that he failed sufficiently to understand that while government may cheerily be called upon to explain itself on public radio or television, it may in no way be called upon to account for itself,” wrote Bruce.
On the Friday he shut down his microphone, I went along to Perlman’s farewell party. At it were past and present colleagues who produce the AM-Live, Midday Live and PM-Live programmes. The three together are fine public radio. This is radio that is impartial, interesting, non-commercial and without the breathless adenoidal accents of a lot of the airwaves. It is not celebrity radio or shock jock.
Many of the producers had already left the SABC. Two more told me they would finish at the end of March. With them goes a young and vibrant tradition that will no doubt be replaced by Zikalala’s model.
His broadcasting ethos is that the SABC should be a conduit for development information from the state to the public. The African National Congress came to power with an almost seventy percent majority, so he says that he is duty-bound to tell the citizenry what the ruling party is doing.
There is no harm in being a broadcaster of record (like the BBC) but his interpretation means that political reporting at the SABC is increasingly a parade of government announcements, conferences and lame interviews with senior politicians.
Increasingly, the SABC is not run for journalists and programmers by journalists and programmers. Have a look at the board and count the numbers of active practitioners of our craft on it. There are very few.
Pay scales are lousy and the ratio of managers to content producers is too high. In other words, the broadcaster is top-heavy. In such a structure, the cream of the crop leaves as soon as they can.
CNBC Africa, the satellite business channel to be broadcast on DSTV, is snapping up the SABC’s finest journalists like Lerato Mbele and Njanje Chauke as well as almost all the SAfm producers who are leaving.
With more private television channels in the offing, the future of the SABC as a home of excellent journalism is at risk. Perlman is not the first to leave; he will not be the last.
Ferial Haffajee is the editor of the weekly Mail & Guardian and the chairperson of the South African National Editors Forum.