allAfrica.com: South Africa: Nation Needs a Fair SABC to Rise Out of the Ruins (Page 1 of 2)

WHAT a mess! The CEO suspends the head of news; the board of directors suspends the CEO; the parliamentary portfolio committee passes a vote of no confidence in the board.

Such a slapstick performance would be worthy of a Monty Python comedy routine were it not so tragic. For what we are witnessing is the destruction of an immensely important national institution. The SABC, with its three TV channels and 14 radio stations, is one of the most powerful broadcasting organisations in the world. It should be the central pillar in the building of our new democracy, for a well-informed public is an organic necessity for the healthy functioning of a democratic system.

Instead, it has become a snake pit of venomous contestation between political factions bent on seizing this national institution for their own partisan purposes.

They have trashed it in the process. Nearly all its best professional journalists, broadcasters, programmers and filmmakers have either been fired or have quit in disgust. Those who are left cower in unproductive corners, trying to survive the hissing snakes who dominate the place.

As a result the SABC has lost all quality and credibility.

The sad thing is that the African National Congress (ANC) itself knows better. In the early years after its unbanning, it committed itself with real sincerity to the project of restructuring the SABC, which had been perverted into a shameful propaganda organ by the old apartheid regime.

Under the direction of Pallo Jordan, who was then the head of the ANC's information and publicity department, and his deputy, Gill Marcus, the ANC linked up with media organisations to launch a major training campaign aimed at building a new pool of journalists, broadcasters and administrators that could be drawn on to restructure the SABC in preparation for the new SA.

The emphasis throughout this urgent campaign was on the importance of a "public broadcaster," as distinct from a state broadcaster, that would focus on the broad public interest rather than the narrow political interests of the ruling party.

The campaign elicited enormous public interest after years of resentment at the slanted and dull SABC. International media organisations came to the party. Public broadcasters in Britain, Australia, Canada and the US sent scores of trainers to this country and invited some of the most promising local talent to their countries for on-the-job training. They poured millions into the project.

All of which has been wasted. Hardly anyone who went through that intense programme remains at the SABC. They were there for a time, providing SA with a Prague Spring of good public broadcasting that gave excellent coverage of our first democratic election, but they melted away as the political apparatchiks took over.

The high point was the selection of the new SA's first SABC board -- an extraordinarily democratic affair, even by international standards.

The process was thrashed out between the government and the ANC as a sideshow to the constitutional negotiations taking place at the World Trade Centre. Civil society organisations were invited to submit nominations, from which a carefully balanced, multiracial selection panel of eight lawyers, co-chaired by two Supreme Court judges, Piet Schabort and Ismail Mohamed, who were also joint chairmen of the negotiating council itself, would choose a short list to be interviewed for positions on a 25-member board.

There were more than 500 nominees, from which 45 were short-listed. The interviews took place in public, before packed audiences in a cavernous hall at the World Trade Centre, and they were televised live.

One would have thought that 45 job interviews for appointments to the board of directors of a parastatal corporation would not make for gripping TV , but such was the level of public fascination born of years of exasperation at the abuse of the SABC that the hearings drew some of the highest audience ratings in the broadcaster's history.

As it turned out, then president FW de Klerk tarnished the process by vetoing six of the selected board members and appointing his own replacements. He had the legal power to do so, but it violated an agreement reached by the constitutional negotiators and caused public outrage.

More seriously, it set a precedent, right at the start, of politically motivated presidential interference in the selection of the broadcaster's board of directors -- so that De Klerk must carry some of the blame for the corruption that followed.

Nelson Mandela was able to redress some of De Klerk's damage by reinstating a few of the vetoed board members after he became president. For its part, the board was able to appoint and support Zwelakhe Sisulu as CEO.

Sisulu had the advantages of being both a good professional journalist and a member of ANC royalty, which enabled him to withstand pressures from above. So for the next four years the SABC -- and the South African public -- enjoyed its Prague Spring of decent broadcasting.

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