VIGNETTE FROM SOS SUPPORT PUBLIC BROADCASTING:CAMPAIGN TO SUPPORT TRANSPARENT AND ACCOUNTABLE PROCESS TO APPOINT THE SABC PERMANENT BOARD
SOS is in the middle of an SABC Board Campaign to ensure maximum public engagement and transparency on the part of Parliament to appoint a permanent SABC Board in September 2017. This within the context of SOS support for the Parliamentary Inquiry into the fitness of the SABC Board to hold office in December 2016/January 2017, and massive support for the SABC 8, SABC unions and staff in their resistance to the climate of fear and lawlessness that has pervaded the SABC for at least the last eight years or more, and increasingly so under Hlaudi Motsoeneng, James Aguma and other “Hlaudi enforcers”.
Today – 15 August 2017 – is the first day of the shortlisting of the 362 nominations sent in by the public for the SABC Board. This is an unprecedented number of nominations.
In June SOS, along with amandla.mobi and Media Monitoring Africa (MMA), set up the independent platform SABCYethu (“The SABC is ours”). The business of this website, amplified by social media, has been to increase public awareness, participation in, and transparency of, the nomination process. The website also provides a brief overview of the history of the crises at the SABC, and elicits people’s opinions the kind of public broadcaster people want. We will now use amandla.mobi’s awethu platform to run surveys, publish score cards, and lobby those who are shortlisted to sign up to good practice principles of public broadcasting to which we can hold them accountable. This campaign has been picked up and showcased by several media houses.
Simultaneously we are rolling out a partnership with City Press to monitor the process, educate their print and online readers, and deepen public participation and scrutiny of the process. The partnership officially begins in the week of 21 August. City Press will put onlinean SOS op-ed on why the new Board matters, and why transparency to appoint the Board matters. City Press senior SABC reporter, Charl Blignaut will report on the four previous Boards. He will also report on shortlisted candidates: what we can expect from them, who didn’t make it and why not?
In the weeks following we will continue the partnership as follows: The City Press print edition on 27 August will preview the process and look at the week ahead. In week of 28 August there will be daily online coverage of interviews from 29 August to 1 September. There will be blogs on each candidate. Interview highlights will be tweeted live from Parliament, and a daily summary will go out on the media partner’s special reports section and the dedicated SABC Yethu platform. The print edition of 3 September will carry summaries from online publishing and opinion piece for Voices. And there will be online analyses by SOS and forecasting, with the final announcement of the Board.
Concurrently we are running a series of public advocacy workshops in Gauteng communities based on our highly successful digital terrestrial television (DTT) model. Our engagement focuses on linking people’s daily struggles to the role of our public broadcaster. And the workshops create opportunities to increase the number and range of people who engage with this public process.
In the last month we have also carried op eds in the Daily Maverick by Kate Skinner and the Daily Vox by Koketso Moeti. Both have been widely circulated on social media and media lists.
This campaign is part of SOS work to foreground the SABC’s role in our constitutional democracy. Watch this space as we plan to achieve what has not been achieved so far in our young democracy – a stable permanent SABC Board that is accountable to “we, the people of South Africa”, and that finishes its term with the same accolades that the current Interim Board is currently being lauded.