Africa, Development & Aid, Headlines

MEDIA-SOUTHERN AFRICA: Broadcasting Up In The Air, Up For Grabs

Patricia A. Made

HARARE, Dec 1 1998 (IPS) - Opening up the airwaves in Southern Africa, and in Africa, is almost akin to the old saying of ‘let the chips fall where they may!’

In fact, Aida Opoku Mensah, author of the overview to a new study on broadcasting in southern Africa, says “no one knows how broadcasting will shape up in the future”.

‘Up In The Air: The State of Broadcasting in Southern Africa’, produced by The Panos Institute Southern Africa, examines broadcasting in six countries at a time when the sector “is experiencing the greatest upheaval in its history,” says the overview to the book which was released Tuesday.

Opoku Mensah, formerly the regional director for Panos in Southern Africa, says “the book is called ‘Up In The Air’, because broadcasting is still not grounded in any policy framework in Southern Africa, and it is one sector greatly affected by changing technology.”

“If you look at the six countries studied in the book — Botswana, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Zambia — broadcasting in the countries is going in different directions,” says Opoku Mensah, now a programme officer with the Ford Foundation in West Africa. “In each country, the sector is affected by political, social and economic factors.”

Where the broadcasting sector is headed in Africa is still largely an unanswered question, says Opoku Mensah, adding that the broadcasting policy in African countries is flawed and does not serve the needs of the people.

African countries have been quick to jump on the bandwagon of liberalisation in all sectors, and opening up the airwaves has become a popular refrain. But in practice, “only those with power and money can own or have access to the airwaves,” says Opoku Mensah.

One of the biggest challenges faced by the broadcast sector in Southern Africa is the transformation of national or state- owned broadcast stations into public broadcasters.

“With the exception of South Africa, little or no debate has taken place to define what ‘public service broadcasting actually means, let alone what it entails,” Opoku Mensah writes in the overview to the study.

“Instead, the concept has been lifted from a dictionary of European and North American broadcasting terms and imported into new legislation, where it rings as hollow as the chimes of Big Ben on the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) World Service,” she adds.

South African lawyer, Amos Vilakazi, says the broadcasting sector in the region is still largely “state controlled” and does not serve the public at large. While governments talk of liberalising the airwaves, they maintain a heavy hand of control.

In Zimbabwe, for example, where broadcasting reforms have been talked about for years, “the heavy hand of government inhibits the advancement of broadcasting,” says John Manyarara, a retired judge. “The absence of an independent broadcast authority,” Manyarare adds, also keeps the sector firmly under state control.

In Namibia, says Kaitira Kandjii, one of the authors of the section on Namibia, “the public is not vigilant enough in checking what the government is doing…” Shortly after independence in 1990, the new democratic government in Namibia pushed through liberalisation of the state broadcaster and deregulation of the airwaves.

But Kandjii says that the Namibia Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) is more state-controlled than ever, with certain stories, like coverage of Namibia’s involvement in the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), being vetted before they are aired.

National broadcasters have found it hard to shed their “propaganda” role, making it hard for them to take the steps to define a public role. “Broadcasting was a propaganda tool of colonialists and those who inherited the new governments did not re-conceptualise the role of broadcasting,” says Opoku Mensah.

Kandjii echoes this view, but argues that Southern African countries need to even go further and “re-think their understanding of media”.

“Historically, the media came with colonialism, and it is not seen as an African medium. We have to learn how to appropriate the media and make it ours,” he says.

The book aims to focus debate on how broadcasting can best contribute towards the development of a well-informed society in Southern Africa, where an estimated 100 million people regularly listen to state-funded radio stations.

Manyarara believes that the “general public” must dictate the transformation of the broadcasting sector in Zimbabwe and other countries in the region, but this will entail a massive education exercise.

“To re-establish public ownership of the public broadcaster,” Vilakazi says, “the people must be shown the relevance of the public broadcaster. The public needs to understand its role with the media and it must be educated to understand that the media is a weapon.”

 
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