/ 10 July 2008

SABC: Spread the power, don’t concentrate it

Many countries dilute the power of political forces over public broadcasting, and South Africa could adopt a lot from their systems.

A case in point is Germany’s post-World War II system, which was directly designed to curtail state influence on broadcasting — in reaction to abuse by the Nazi regime.

Public broadcasting in Germany is distributed across 12 autonomous organisations, and on average the boards of these institutions comprise:

  • State and party officials: 32%

  • Trade and industry, and unions: 25%

  • NGOs: 20%

  • Churches: 9%

  • Education, science, culture, other reps: 14%

NGOs and unions are also represented on public broadcaster boards in Albania, Bosnia, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Lithuania and Slovenia.

A portion of board members are elected representatives of the broadcaster’s staff themselves, in countries such as France, Macedonia, Romania and Slovenia.

And while political nominees make up one-third of the two public broadcaster boards in Hungary, only half this quota may come from the ruling party. The rest have to come from the opposition.

South Africa needs to depoliticise the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) by switching to a similar system of a sectorally appointed board, and by shrinking the representation by those candidates chosen by politicians (Parliament-Presidency-party).

Spreading the governance of the SABC in this way would take the broadcaster to much higher levels of public accountability. It would incorporate a wide spectrum of stakeholders such that they accommodate their interests within the board, rather than the existing external contest for control in a winner-takes-all model.

Right now, this kind of radical reform is not on the cards among the players in the current stalemate.

Parliament wants to fire the existing SABC board, while the president and minister back the body. To break that impasse, MPs are now tabling a Bill to give MPs the authority to get the board fired.

What really needs attention is the appointments side of the equation, but the proposed amendment to the Broadcasting Act is limited to compelling the president to remove SABC board members if told to do so by Parliament.

In initiating the legislation, Parliament seems to be pre-empting a proposal by Minister of Communications Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri that the entire SABC governance issue (not just the dismissal issue) should be reviewed.

Her own suggestion is to remove MPs from having any direct role over who is on — or off — the board.

That proposal echoes similar thinking last year when she unsuccessfully sought to have council members of the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) appointed by a committee of notables and her office — with Parliament only being involved in selecting the notables.

But the minister’s proposed process could fail to reach fruition before her own term of office expires with the forthcoming election. Yet if legislative changes in relation to the SABC crisis deal only with dismissal, a major opportunity will have been lost.

This is because the underlying reason for MPs wanting to fire the existing board in the first place can be tracked right back to the political monopoly on appointing people to the board.

Part of Parliament’s frustration lies in the way it was reportedly railroaded into nominating board members last year according to the president’s preferences (as interpreted by the party) — rather than the legislature-executive relationship being the other way around.

However, the MPs’ Bill does not avoid the potential for exactly the same kind of domination to happen via the party. There could still be cases of a state president using the office of party presidency to instruct MPs to choose — or axe — certain candidates for politically driven reasons.

Neither the MPs’ approach, nor even the minister’s proposal of an indirect role for Parliament, removes politics from the SABC’s governance. The only way to do so, in fact, is to ensure that the whole system is no longer the exclusive business of politicians.

Elected officials do of course represent public interests, but they also represent their own institutional and/or factional interests. That’s why, in governing public assets like the SABC, they need to be balanced by direct representation of public bodies. Ultimately, it’s also in politicians’ own interests that no political faction is able to prevail over the SABC.

That, after all, is how public broadcasting is supposed to be. Other countries have systems to achieve this — why can’t we?