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The Right2Know Campaign welcomes the decision by ICASA that the SABC’s ban on coverage of protests is in violation of the Broadcasting Act. There was only one way in which ICASA could legitimately have ruled, and by upholding our constitutional rights of freedom of expression and information ICASA chose the correct path. The chairman of ICASA’s Complaints and Compliance Committee correctly stated that the coverage ban “places and absolute ban on a subject. A subject, as such, may never be blocked from SABC television or radio - South Africa is not, as in the apartheid era, a dictatorship”. We commend our allied organisations the SOS Coalition, Media Monitoring Africa and the Freedom of Expression Institute who together brought the case to ICASA. Their hard work has won us an important victory in the battle to reclaim our public broadcaster.

But it is one victory in a larger campaign and Hlaudi Motsoeneng and his cabal remain deaf to the massive public outcry against the censorship, purges, propaganda, cronyism and financial mismanagement that have come to define the SABC. At a press conference yesterday Hlaudi bluntly said that “we are not going to change anything”. His Board of lapdogs that rubber stamp all of his disastrous decisions duly sang along. We are not surprised - this is the sort of outright contempt for the public, media workers, fundamental constitutional values and for democratic institutions that we have come to expect from Hlaudi and the morally bankrupt clique that surrounds him.

In a desperate effort to scrape back a degree of popular legitimacy, Hlaudi has appealed to an assortment of Zupta-aligned political thugs and faux revolutionaries and attempted to win over struggling artists with his promise of 90 percent local content. By conflating the burning issue of censorship with the issue of content - two totally separate matters - Hlaudi is disingenuously portraying his critics as being opposed to local content quotas. These are the tactics of a man driven into a corner.

Yet with breathtaking arrogance and at the risk of alienating his political masters, Hlaudi has even given the middle finger to a growing circle of ANC leaders who are increasingly fed up with seeing a petty tyrant run the country’s most important media machine into the ground. Although Hlaudi is carrying out the will of a corrupt and paranoid faction of the ruling elite who want to see the public broadcaster peddling a tightly controlled narrative, to many in the ANC he is an embarrassment and political liability ahead of highly contested elections.

We have reached out to the ANC to insist that the party refrain from politically interfering in the broadcaster, and use its legitimate influence in parliament and government to rein in its renegade minister of communications who is propping up Hlaudi and take the necessary steps to fix the underlying problems that compromise the SABC's independence and prevent it from carrying out its mandate to the people. Should the party fail to adequately respond we will take our protests to Luthuli House this Friday, July 15. It is the governing party that is ultimately responsible for the systematic politicisation, censorship and attempts over the years to bring the SABC under greater state control which has led to the current sorry state of affairs at the broadcaster and its virtual capture by the Zuma faction. If the ANC is as serious about turning around the public broadcaster as Jackson Mthembu's strong words imply, then it needs to practice what it preaches and rein in those who are letting Hlaudi run the broadcaster like his own spaza shop. 

We call on allied organisations and concerned members of the public to join us at a meeting tomorrow, Wednesday 13 July, from 2:00PM - 4:30PM at Civicus House, 24 Gwigwi Mrwebi St, Newtown to plan further direct action to save our public broadcaster.

Issued by Right2Know