COMMUNITY RADIO WILL NOT HAPPEN

We should not get too excited by news that the Swaziland Broadcasting Bill (2013) contains a provision for community radio stations to operate – it is not going to happen. 

 

The Bill sets out some general guidelines for how the stations might operate. It states that a community broadcasting service shall serve a community, and the members of that community that such community broadcasting service is intended to serve shall be given an opportunity to run the service. The programming provided by a community broadcasting service shall reflect the needs of the people in the community, which shall include culture, language and demographic needs.

The broadcaster shall provide distinct broadcasting service dealing specifically with issues which are not predominantly dealt with by the public broadcasting service covering the same area. The station shall serve to eradicate information poverty through participatory communication in the community as well as being informative, educational and entertaining. 

And that is why they will never get off the ground. The community radio stations would allow voices at present unheard in Swaziland to take to the airwaves, and that is something King Mswati III, who rules Swaziland as sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch, does not want to happen.

Nearly all broadcasting in Swaziland is state controlled and the news and information that is given out by them is heavily censored. The only non-state controlled broadcasting – one radio station and one TV channel – censor themselves sufficiently that they are indistinguishable from the state controlled ones.

At present there are no community radio stations in Swaziland. Any attempts to set up community radio in Swaziland have been stalled by a government that says it is in support of such initiatives, but which fails to come up with the licences to let it happen.

If community radio stations were to launch and truly served the interests of their community they would challenge the present news media that is dominated by the needs of political, social and business elites in the kingdom.

The Bill might raise the optimism levels of people advocating for freedom of speech in Swaziland, but that optimism would be misplaced.

There has been little evidence since the Swazi Constitution was enacted in February 2006 that the kingdom is moving toward democracy. The news media are still unable to publish material critical of the monarchy and government ministers have sought to restrict the media’s access to information.

There is no such thing as a free press in Swaziland. There are at least 30 pieces of legislation that restricts the activities of the media in some way or another. Newspapers must be licensed by the government and any number of informal rules of conduct governs what can be talked about in the media and other public spaces.

There is no reason why the ruling elite in Swaziland would want to relax these laws and rules to allow more voices to be heard. The reason why they presently restrict the media is to control the flow of information and discussion. In this way members of the elite groups maintain their privileged positions.

A ‘community’ radio station should be a non-profit service that is owned and managed by the particular community the radio station serves. They are also different from the present commercial or state-controlled media in Swaziland because they allow a diversity of voices and opinions to be heard. This is because they are open to participation from all parts of the community.

Community radio can provide a platform for the discussion about matters that the community itself consider important. These issues might not be the same things that the monarch, the chiefs, or business houses think are important. And, because community radio allows dissenting voices to be heard people who presently have control in Swaziland will see it as dangerous.

The Bill is also unlikely to be enacted because the chiefs will not allow it.  In Swaziland the non-democratic nature of the kingdom requires people to defer to the wishes of local chiefs (who are in effect representatives of the monarch). If the chiefs do not support the community radio project, it will not happen. It really is as simple as that.

We have yet to see what position the chiefs take on the Bill but it is difficult to see that they would allow potentially subversive media into their areas. Instead, if they allowed the community radio into their chiefdoms at all they would want to have control over them. This would make it impossible to have truly ‘community’ radio. However, the idea of a ‘local’ radio, along the lines of the present national state-controlled SBIS that prominently reported the chiefs’ comings and goings (as the national radio does with the king) would probably be very attractive to them.

See also

THE CASE FOR COMMUNITY MEDIA

http://swazimedia.blogspot.com/2008/06/case-for-community-media.html

SWAZILAND NEEDS MORE MEDIA OUTLETS

http://swazimedia.blogspot.com/2008/05/swaziland-needs-more-media-outlets.html

BBC ON SWAZILAND ELECTION DAY

For those of you who missed it here is a report made by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) on election day in Swaziland last Friday (19 September 2008).

It went out on Africa Today on the BBC World Service radio. The BBC found a lot of voter apathy in the cities, but less in rural areas. Some people said they didn’t believe in the political system in Swaziland (where political parties are banned).

Click below to hear the report which lasts nearly three minutes.

See also

ELECTIONS

SWAZILAND ELECTIONS 2008 BLOGSITE

SWAZILAND NEEDS MORE MEDIA OUTLETS

It will be hard to create more media outlets in Swaziland, because the kingdom is too poor to support them.

That was one of the key findings from a meeting held to discuss media freedom in Swaziland.

The Weekend Observer reported (17 May 2008) that there had been some attempts to start new publications, but these had closed down after getting into financial difficulties and this denied people their freedom of choice.

The Weekend Observer was reporting on a meeting of media folk in Siteki held to commemorate World Press Freedom Day.

Participants noted that in Swaziland today there is not freedom of the media and one way to tackle this would be to have more media outlets. At the moment just about all broadcasting is state controlled and there are only two newspaper groups (one, the Observer, is in effect owned by King Mswati III; the other, the Times, is a private company).

The Weekend Observer reported, that independent publications such as Business Sunday and the sports paper Ligoli closed because of ‘financial challenges’.

It is true that such publications closed because they could not attract enough readers or companies that wanted to advertise in them.

This should come as no surprise, however, because Swaziland is a desperately poor country with about 70 per cent of the population of just under one million living in abject poverty. They have no money to buy newspapers and advertisers do not want to advertise to them because they have no money to spend.

Until the economy of the kingdom improves spectacularly that situation will not change.

Despite this obvious economic reality there are many media people in Swaziland who want to try to create more media outlets. According to the Weekend Observer, media professionals want financial institutions in Swaziland to help them launch new outlets.

They claim that people in Swaziland are crying out for a third newspaper to rival the Times and the Observer.

I don’t know where the evidence for this is. It’s true that there are a number of improvements that could be made to the existing newspapers, but that doesn’t mean that any new newspaper would be able to do any better. If you look at the Times and the Observer, for example, between 40 and 50 percent of their content is taken up with sport, leisure and entertainment. Would a new newspaper be any different? What would they put in its place?

Would a new newspaper not concentrate on reporting from the urban areas of Swaziland (as the existing newspapers do)? Would it report less about the king and the status quo, than the papers we already have? I think the answer to all the questions here is probably, ‘no’.

The Weekend Observer reported Comfort Mabuza, the national director of the Media Institute of Southern Africa - Swaziland chapter (MISA), saying there should be more pluralism and diversity in the media.

He said that aspiring media owners often were too optimistic about the amount of money they could get from advertising. He said they should get more training in business enterprise before they try to start up new ventures. Also, donor agencies might be approached to give start up money to help new media ventures.

He advised aspiring media entrepreneurs to contact the Southern Africa Institute for Media Entrepreneurship Development (SAIMED) in Botswana, which had been tasked by MISA with helping emerging media enterprises to set management controls, sales and marketing ‘and other innovating ways of sustaining media business’.

I am reminded that in June 2007 MISA Swaziland unveiled a report that suggested there could be sufficient advertising in the kingdom to support small local / community newspapers in Swaziland. As far as I know nothing further has been done on this project.

Personally, I support the demand for more media in Swaziland, but I doubt if there is much money around to support commercial print media. A much better way forward would be to set up small community radio stations in the kingdom. These could be owned and controlled by members of the community they serve.

If experiences across the world are anything to go by, these stations could be set up with very little cost. The United Nations Economic, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is always willing to meet the costs of studios and transmitters. The running costs of such stations would be low because they would be run and operated by members of the community, often acting as volunteers.

This is a simple way of introducing pluralism and diversity into media in Swaziland. I doubt if it will happen if history is anything to go by. Any attempts to set up community radio in Swaziland have been stalled by a government that says it is in support of such initiatives, but which fails to come up with the licences to let it happen.

No one who observes Swaziland would be in the least surprised by this. Broadcasting is strictly controlled by the state. Only ‘authorised’ voices are allowed on the airways and views that run contrary to the monarchy or the government’s are not allowed to be heard.

With such a control over what information people can receive why on earth would the ruling elite allow community radio to operate?

No, I’m afraid that even though Swaziland should have more voices, change will not come. Not until we have a proper democracy in the kingdom and its rulers can be held to account.

See also
A VOICE FOR THE VOICELESS
WHAT’S IN THE SWAZILAND PAPERS?