“We will continue to keep this issue in the public domain, hoping that the end of the mandate of the SABC’s current board members in November will perhaps bring light at the end of the tunnel,” Jane Duncan, FXI’s executive director, told Bizcommunity.com.
“We are also happy that ICASA is investigating the matter and even though we do not know how they will rule, we are however confident that people will start talking now about the kind of board they would like to see at the SABC.”
As she spoke, protesters sang revolutionary songs and held banners, which some of them read: “Free the SABC”, “Whose SABC is it?”, “SABC is the conveyor belt of government” – all this under the watchful eye of the police, who closed some parts of Henley Street, to help protesters ‘freely exercise’ their democratic rights.
Friday’s protest was the culmination of a series of pickets and demonstrations that took place last month throughout the country outside the public broadcaster’s offices in Durban (26 March), Cape Town (28 March) and Polokwane (30 March).
This programme of action is part of the follow-up of the memorandum submitted to SABC management on 16 November last year, and which they had committed to respond. But no response has been received yet, Virginia Setshedi-Magwaza, FXI’s head of media and ICT programmes, said.
Protesters came from various social and political movements, including the Traditional Healers Organisation, Soweto Concerned Residents, South African Rail-hawkers Association, the Socialist Party of Azania (SOPA) and the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC).
Asked to comment, PAC spokesperson Livingstone Mkruquli said: “We are a mass-based organisation and we are here to support these protesters because we believe that the masses are being oppressed.
“We all know about the SABC’s tendencies; it represents a few chosen as it has become an ANC-controlled organisation. It does not reflect the true happenings of our society. This is another form of oppression and we need the liberation of the SABC,” he added.
“All is not well in Auckland Park,” one insider told Bizcommunity.com recently, without elaborating further but later adding that it is time that the media starts calling the SABC a state-run institution just like the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC).
Several attempts to get comments from the SABC drew a blank, but speaking to Bizcommunity.com a couple of days ago, the man at the centre of the controversy, Dr Snuki Zikalala, said: “The more you are criticized, the more you become stronger.”
