The Congress of South African Trade Unions welcomes the ruling by Judge CJ Claassen in the South Gauteng High Court that the Independent Communication Authority of South Africa (Icasa) must relaunch a probe into alleged political interference at the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) in 2006.
The ruling fully vindicates the view taken by COSATU, the Freedom of Expression Institute (FXI) and others in 2006, that the SABC had been guilty of manipulating the public broadcaster for factional political ends by blacklisting political commentators.
At the time COSATU wrote to the then SABC Chief Executive, Dali Mpofu, expressing concern at allegations that the SABC had banned four top black political commentators - Aubrey Matshiqi, William Gumede, Karima Brown and Vukani Mde - and that SABC editor Snuki Zikalala had told his staff that opinion pieces by the four commentators should not be accepted for use in the public broadcaster`s news and current-affairs programmes. We demanded that he confirm or deny the truth of this allegation.
The SABC set up a commission under former SABC CEO Zwelakhe Sisulu and Advocate Gilbert Marcus SC. Their report has never been officially published, but was widely reported to have found that the SABC did indeed have "an arbitrary blacklist of outside commentators who should not be consulted".
They also said that "there is a climate of fear in the broadcaster's newsrooms" and were scathing about "the arbitrary decision-making, the iron-fist rule and the lack of editorial knowledge of the news and current affairs managing director Snuki Zikalala”.
Yet despite these extremely serious charges, the SABC only gave the man responsible a 'verbal warning' not to repeat his offences, implying that they did not consider political censorship as a serious matter.
As a result of this feeble response, the FXI laid a complaint over the blacklisting with Icasa, which is charged with monitoring the SABC’s compliance with its charter. They however refused to consider the complaint and so the FXI took them to court.
Judge Claassen found Icasa’s reasoning “fundamentally flawed” “If correct,” he said, “it would mean that the SABC may with impunity manipulate and distort the preparation of its news and current affairs coverage and publicly lie about it when they are caught out having done so”.
He found the SABC’s then board guilty of dereliction of duty in failing to take any action “when the manipulation and dishonest cover-up was exposed by its own Commission of Inquiry”.
Echoing the complaints made by COSATU at the time, the judge found that Zikalala had:
- Unlawfully manipulated SABC news coverage of Zimbabwe’s 2005 elections in favour of President Robert Mugabe, blacklisting critical commentators such as Elinor Sisulu, Moeletsi Mbeki and Trevor Ncube;
- Blacklisted political commentators critical of then-president Thabo Mbeki and his government;
- Blocked coverage of then KwaZulu-Natal premier Sbu Ndebele being pelted with objects and booed in June 2005, two days after Mbeki sacked then deputy president Jacob Zuma, letting him deny it had happened on air.
The federation agrees totally with the judge, that “Dr Zikalala’s blacklisting of commentators perceived to be critical of the government of the day was clearly designed to silence their voices by not allowing them on air. His purpose was obviously to manipulate the SABC’s news and current affairs programmes by excluding these critical voices from them. To suggest that this blacklisting might not have had an effect is quite incorrect … the conduct of Dr Zikalala, in effect, amounted to pre-censorship”.
The ruling will also lend support to a complaint made by COSATU around the same time over media reports of remarks allegedly made at an ANC media briefing by "a senior SABC personality" about the need to `isolate and neutralise` COSATU General Secretary.
The SABC never disassociated itself from these comments nor took any action to discipline the SABC personality who made them. In the light of the judge’s findings, it is clear that such a remark would have been entirely consistent with the practices employed within the SABC at the time.
Then, COSATU expressed its passionate belief in the need for a truly independent public broadcaster, and that “it must never be allowed to play a partisan role and form part of factions in our movement”. Now Judge Claassen says exactly the same, that the SABC’s news and current affairs programmes has to meet “the highest standards of journalism”, providing “fair and unbiased coverage” with “impartiality, balance and independence from government commercial and other interests”.
The lessons from this episode must be learned. The SABC has a new board, which is grappling with the corporation’s many problems. There have however been suggestions that the current management is continuing with similar practices to those exposed by the judge, with reports of purges for political reasons.
COSATU will continue to oppose any such practices and pledges the board its full support as it strives to make our public broadcaster the true voice of the people of South Africa, which will never again be abused to serve the narrow interests of political factions.