Failure to amend SA's fatally outdated broadcasting laws

No new policies or enacted legislation for 19 years

Not that I've seen any innovative policy ideas coming from South African opposition parties but it is now a fact that the Sixth Administration (since democracy) approved no new policies, White Papers or legislation to overhaul SA's fatally outdated broadcasting laws. Zero.

The audio and audiovisual policy process appears to have disappeared without trace after we made a good (re)start in 2020 and the flawed SABC Bill has now been kicked into touch.

The sad part is that policy and legislative reform was both extremely doable and urgently necessary in the last two decades.

Yet the public broadcaster is expected to survive and flourish while operating within

an archaic, media legislative and regulatory framework that is now hostile to the sustainability of public media. SABC's founding law is 25 years old this year. The general industry framework is 19 years old. In reality it is actually much older than that - the broadcasting services chapter in the Electronic Communications Act is based on the same law we drafted THIRTY ONE YEARS AGO at South Africa’s Multi-Party Negotiating Process.

Back then I was a bright-eyed 31 year old with a 400 ton laptop and was the only one on that Technical Committee who could type! So we drafted the Independent Broadcasting Authority Bill as part of the package of laws that prepared the transition to the first democratic elections. The IBA Act was enacted in 1993 and was based on what was international best practice at the time. It also made law several major new policy initiatives as proposed by civil society groupings aligned with the United Democratic Front (UDF). These included major new policy initiatives on community media, quotas for SA music and television programing and ownership limitations. But that was then.

The law was rooted in a media environment where the internet was nascent and broadcasters and print media all powerful. It is now totally unsuited to a world where global, US-owned platform, social media and streaming companies stride the globe on the internet which has become dominant platform for all communications, media and entertainment. As one of the early participants in SA broadcast policy, is hard for me to believe we still have that very 90s framework applying to the world of AI, streaming and news platformisation.

This ossification of law and policy has had huge implications for SA’s ability to appropriately deal with the promotion of SA’s content industries, online harms, the platformisation of news and the sustainability of public media.

As South Africa approaches what many have called the most important national election since the dawn of democracy in 1994, the media should also be asking why there has been such an unacceptable policy hiatus and what each political party is planning to do about it, whether in government or from the opposition benches.