LOCAL TV COMES FIRST IN SWAZILAND

Swazi Television, the only TV station in Swaziland, could be making a huge mistake if it thinks ‘going global’ on South Africa’s satellite broadcaster DSTV will bring it benefits.

The Swazi Government that controls Swazi TV seems to think that by introducing the channel that is at present only available ‘free to air’ to people in Swaziland to viewers across the world it will herald a bright new future.

But why does it conclude this? According to a report in the Times Sunday, an independent newspaper in Swaziland, more and more people in Swaziland are signing up to DSTV, the satellite-channels based in South Africa. It is supposed they do this because they prefer the programmes on the satellite channel to those Swazi TV puts out. The solution, according to Bongani Mdluli, chairman of the Swaziland Consumer Association, is to buy programmes that would bring back the DSTV viewers.

What he didn’t say is which programmes these would be.

It seems that the Swazi Government and the Consumer Association want Swazi TV to broadcast broadly speaking the same kinds of programmes as all the other channels on DSTV – stuff that would appeal to a global audience.

If that is what they think is the way forward, they are probably badly mistaken.

Swazi TV is financed by a licence fee levied on the viewers. That means it is the people’s TV station. At present the station’s programming is mostly bought-in material from the United States, plus a small number of home-grown programmes: plus, the state-controlled news bulletins.

As a viewer myself I can see why people want something different. I do too. But ‘different’ doesn’t mean doing what everybody else does.

The Swazi Government has missed the point of local television. It is TV for the people.

The problem with DSTV programming is that it promotes cultures that are alien to Swazis. A vast amount comes from the United States or the United Kingdom and reflects language, values and lifestyles which are often vastly different from those of ordinary Swazi people. Think about the programmes that have nudity / sex scenes, for example.

Swaziland’s cultural values can be seriously damaged if Swazi children continue to be exposed to TV programmes with massive foreign content which do not promote local cultural values.

The majority of Swazis who live in towns are virtually inundated with information that is culturally irrelevant to them. The expectations promoted on TV are beyond their means and the values and lifestyles portrayed contradict and conflict with those of their own culture.

The problem with the ‘global’ TV as DSTV shows is that it wasn’t intended to be shown in Swaziland, or any other developing nation.

Today’s Swazi are becoming ‘Anglo American’ in their mentality without ever setting foot in England or America, instead of identifying themselves with Swazi values and traditions.

Swazi TV should create programming locally because that content can better meet the community’s local needs. The programmes can use knowledge and experience that is relevant to the community.

That means that Swazi people can ‘talk’ with each other on television, expressing their own ideas, knowledge and culture in their own language.

But of course for this change to happen you need owners or producers with the motivation to create it. To do this in Swaziland all levels of the society, including the government which controls broadcasting in the kingdom, must recognize the need to support those who create, produce and distribute the programmes.

We should support local TV before we worry about ‘going global’.

See also

‘BIG BROTHER’ SNUBS SWAZILAND

http://swazimedia.blogspot.com/2011/01/big-brother-snubs-swaziland.html

'BIG BROTHER' SNUBS SWAZILAND

Swazi newspapers are getting their knickers in a twist because the television ‘reality show’ Big Brother Africa 6 (BBA6) won’t be auditioning for contestants in Swaziland.

But why are they surprised? Swaziland was excluded from the previous five series of BBA, so nothing’s different now.

In last year’s (2010) series (BBA5) 14 ‘housemates’ were put together in a house, locked away from the world, and had cameras following them for 24 hours a day for three months.

The point of the game is that viewers are asked from time to time to nominate one of the housemates for eviction from the house. This goes on until everybody except one person is voted off and that person is declared the winner. The winner gets to go away with US$ 200,000 (about E1.4 million).

Swazis are not invited to audition for a place in the house because not enough people in the kingdom subscribe to DSTV, the satellite television company that broadcasts Big Brother. And Swazi people are just too poor (seven in ten earn less than US$1 a day) to be attractive to advertisers.

BBA6 that starts in May 2011will be the sixth year that Big Brother Africa has been broadcast, but the programme format has been around since the 1990s when it started in the Netherlands. Local versions of the programme have been broadcast around the world since. In its day it was one of the most successful programme formats in the history of television, but in many countries it has past its ‘sell-by’ date and has been dropped.

Back in the 1990s, the programme makers made all kinds of claims for Big Brother. They said it was a social experiment to see how people would react to living so closely to one another without a break and for such a long period. Sociologists and psychologists rushed to praise the programme for its intellectual insights.

Nobody seriously says that kind of thing now. It didn’t take too long before the truth came out. The reality of this ‘reality television’ programme was money. That’s why it took more than a decade to reach Africa – there’s not much money in the continent.

Here’s how it works. The BBA6 programme makers want 14 contestants from across Africa. Instead of auditioning people across the continent and taking the best people they can find they will only look in Africa’s richer nations. That’s why they won’t bother to come to Swaziland.

BBA6 will choose no more than one person from any single country so they can spread the interest in the programme around the continent. Countries to be represented include Angola, Botswana, Kenya and South Africa.

Big Brother is targeted at a very particular audience of young people. To be attractive to sponsors and advertisers the audience need to be in well paying jobs and have money to spend on the goods and services advertisers want to sell.

Advertisers who use television have trouble reaching younger adults, so Big Brother is always aimed specifically at these kinds of people. The programme wants the audience to relate to the participants so they chose men and women to take part who come from a very narrow social demographic.

Usually the housemates are aged in their twenties. They don’t have run-of-the-mill jobs in the real world. In BBA5 contestants had jobs such as ‘radio DJ’, ‘business owner’, ‘radio producer’, ‘events coordinator’, ‘film maker and actor’, ‘musician and broadcaster’, ‘writer, director and actor’, ‘actress, musician and model’. This range of occupations is hardly typical of the average African.

Even though the Swazi people are too poor to be attractive to the programme makers they are being exploited for some of their cash.

MTN, the only cell phone company in Swaziland, sponsors the programme and rakes in the cash by encouraging viewers to send SMS messages to the programme. You also need a cell phone to be able to cast your vote to evict a housemate.

A spokeswoman for DSTV in Swaziland tried to divert attention away from the real cause of Swaziland’s exclusion by saying that some viewers in the kingdom illegally got their service from neighbouring South Africa and this made it look like fewer people in Swaziland were DSTV viewers. This, she claimed, was the reason why Swaziland was not to be represented in BBA6.

According to a report in the Swazi Observer, the newspaper in effect owned and edited by King Mswati III, the spokeswoman even went so far as to urged viewers to ‘demonstrate patriotism’ by taking the DSTV service from Swaziland, rather than from South Africa.

What she didn’t say was that people take the South African service because it broadcasts more live English Premier League football matches that its Swazi counterpart. It’s nothing to do with ‘patriotism’ or BBA.

See also

BIG BROTHER SHOW CONS AFRICANS

http://swazimedia.blogspot.com/2007/11/big-brother-show-cons-africans.html

SWAZILAND FILM 'WAH-WAH' ON DSTV

I wrote in November 2007 about how the film about Swaziland called Wah-Wah had been put up on the Internet for anyone to see.

I know with the poor Internet connections we have in Swaziland this is not a very easy way to watch a movie.

So, the richer readers of this blog might be pleased to know that the movie is being shown by satellite broadcaster M-Net on DSTV from this week.

Wah-Wah was made in 2005, and is a fictionalised account of the last days of British rule in Swaziland, came out. The film, directed by Richard E Grant, is the story of his childhood in Swaziland in the1960s.

Personally, I think the film ignores the exploitation of Swazi people by the British and instead concentrates on a not very interesting story about a young British boy and his family.

The film was shot in Swaziland and there are some good views of the kingdom. The scenes of the day Swaziland received its independence are worth watching.

Because I’m a fair kind of person, I searched the Internet to find a really positive review of Wah-Wah to share with you.

I didn’t quite succeed. But I did find this on a website called Urban Cinefile from Australia

This is a platinum plated cast: Gabriel Byrne is at his best as the decent but troubled, heartbroken alcoholic, while Miranda Richardson cuts loose as his self serving wife. Emily Watson delivers a remarkable characterisation of Ruby, an American who is like a cat amongst the pigeons of England. Julie Walters and Celia Imre (she often plays Queen Elizabeth II look-alikes) are splendid as very different dames of the colony, and Julian Wadham grates just right as Charles, the stuck up oaf. But none of these are caricatures, which saves the film from a fate worse than death: boredom.

I admire how Grant's writing and direction take Africa for granted (pardon the pun) in the sense that we are spared longing long shots of landscapes and similar signs of awestruck filmmaking. He's telling a story about lives shattered, rebuilt and otherwise traversed, in a passage of time that impacts most heavily on the storyteller: puberty. Ralph's rescue is partly engineered by an early romance which is neatly and tastefully built in, while the resolution is bitter sweet - enough to make it real, yet uplifting. It's is the real thing, no wah-wah about it.

The first showing by M-Net of Wah-Wah was this week. Anyone who watches DSTV will know that the movies get repeated over and over again. So, it’s a bit like the buses to Manzini, if you missed one don’t worry there’ll be another along in a while.

See also
‘WAH-WAH’ ON THE INTERNET

BIG BROTHER SHOW CONS AFRICANS

Big Brother Africa 2 (BBA2), the ‘reality’ television show that went on and on and on for three months is finally over.

The Swazi media, particularly the newspapers and mostly the Times of Swaziland, got carried away by the show in which 12 young men and women were put together in a house, made to undertake tasks, had cameras watching them 24 hours a day, and then had viewers decide which ones of them they wanted to evict from the house. This went on and on for 98 days until there was only one ‘housemate’ standing. The winner got to go away with 100,000 US dollars (about 700,000 Swazi emalengeni).

Swazi journalists such as Nathi Gule, who writes a television review in the Times every Friday, thought BBA2 was the best thing since television was invented.

Although the media in Swaziland fell for BBA2, journalists elsewhere in Africa were more aware of that BBA2 was a confidence trick on ordinary Africans.

Daniel Soetan, writing last Saturday (17 November 2007) in the Nigerian newspaper Leadership, compared BBA2 with a previous ‘reality’ TV show called Gulder Ultimate Search. Soetan writes.

‘[Gulder Ultimate Search] was a TV Reality Show that x-rayed the true day-to-day life of average African people.

‘Gulder Ultimate Search was devoid of luxury, flamboyancy etc. No rooms fully air-conditioned, no gas cookers, and other quirths that an average African cannot afford.

‘How will you get an air-conditioner when your ordinary ceiling, standing or even table fan, as the case may be, would require generator to roll the blades?

‘What gas cooker? Can an average Nigerian afford it? My neighbours, even with the kerosene cooking stoves, still have to use charcoal burner to cook oftentimes. The poor family can’t cope with the hike in the price of kerosene.

‘In an hotel one day, during the early days of the just concluded Big Brother Africa, I watched the housemates testing the beautiful new clothes that had just been delivered to them by the organisers. Ask the participants of the Gulder Ultimate Search.

‘The BBA reality show, to an extent, suppresses the truth about the real African. How can you lock up some youths and have them live in a fake world? They briefly enjoy luxury, comfort, a high life style and rich nutritious food that some of them do not enjoy in their real world, only to evict them back into their real world of poverty and hustling.

‘They'll come out more angry, frustrated and aggressive than they went in with so much impatience and greed because they simply desire that it continues to be like it was in the Big Brother House.’

I agree with most of what Daniel Soetan writes but I think he misses an important point. BBA2 wasn’t meant to be about ‘average’ Africans. BBA2 went out on the satellite channel DSTV, a channel that most Swazis don’t watch because they can’t afford to. In Swaziland about 70 per cent of the population exist on less than one US dollar a day.

BBA2 is targeted at a very particular audience of young people. To be attractive to sponsors and advertisers the audience need to be in well paying jobs and have money to spend on the goods and services advertisers want to sell.

Advertisers who use television have trouble reaching younger adults, so BBA2 was aimed specifically at these kinds of people. BBA2 wants the audience to relate to the participants so they chose men and women to take part who come from a very narrow social demographic.

The 12 housemates ranged in ages from 21 to 30-years old, but most of them were aged 23 to 28. They didn’t have run-of-the-mill jobs in the real world. Two described themselves as ‘authors’, one was a model and actress, another was a fashion designer and yet another was a ‘radio personality’. This range of occupations is hardly typical of the average African.

Only countries with people who have money to attract advertisers were allowed to take part. Swazis were not invited to audition for a place in the house because not enough people in the kingdom subscribe to DSTV. Swazis are just too poor.

I’ll leave the final word for today on BBA2 to Ambrose Nuwagira, writing in the New Vision newspaper, Uganda.

‘What has this show portrayed? That life is all about manipulation, hypocrisy, and exploitation, whereby the most clinical in these will always win. This is a blatant lie.

‘To the African child, the biggest question in the last 98 days has been what can an African do for $100,000? The answers were just manifesting on the TV screens; hatred, envy, greed and infidelity.

‘There is absolutely nothing African about big brother.

‘Big brother is a sign of moral degeneration, greed, and gluttony. Africans have a sense of decency, shame, honour, dignity and moral sensibility. These are two contrasting situations. Now that they have broken the codes of decency, have made adultery look attractive and, of recent, portrayed fidelity as insignificant, what will be the next item on stage in an era where HIV/AIDS rates are increasing and vices like homosexuality trying to hold ground? Big Brother Africa portrays high corporate social irresponsibility and has offered our society a disservice.’

See Also

WATCHING BIG BROTHER

READING BIG BROTHER

READING BIG BROTHER

Big Brother Africa 2 (BBA2), the television ‘reality’ show that put 12 young people in a house together and asked the viewers to vote which of them should be thrown out, is getting a lot of coverage in newspapers across Africa. That’s understandable, because a great deal of money has been spent putting the show together and if the publicists can get enough people hooked on it there’s a lot of money to be made for the sponsors.

A good deal of the coverage is in countries that have a representative in the house. Only 12 people were chosen and each of them is from a different country. Only countries with people who have money to attract advertisers were allowed to take part.

Swazis were not invited to audition for a place in the house because not enough people in the kingdom subscribe to DSTV, the satellite television company that is broadcasting BBA2. It seems that Swazis are just too poor.

That hasn’t stopped the Swazi newspapers from running articles about BBA2. I don’t quite see why the newspapers bother since hardly anyone in Swaziland is watching the programme.

Of Swaziland’s two daily newspapers, the Swazi Observer has been publishing most articles detailing what’s going on in the BBA2 house and I can see the irony of a newspaper with hardly any readers writing about a television programme with hardly any viewers

Although the Observer has been publishing BBA2 articles for some time now, its daily rival the Times of Swaziland is catching up.

But the problem is both newspapers are too lazy to write their own articles, even though yesterday both of them devoted a page to the latest ‘news’ from the BBA2 household.

What at first look like columns written by a journalist are actually just a bunch of words copied from the Big Brother Internet site.

I say a ‘bunch of words’ because the inept ‘journalist’ who put the page together for the Observer on Monday (17 September 2007) clearly didn’t even bother to read them. Or maybe, he or she did read them but was a bit too slow to understand what the words actually meant. For in Monday’s article the ‘journalist’ left in lines that are clearly ‘hot links’ for people who are reading the stuff on their computers to click onto and leave their own messages.

When you see the words ‘Make your prediction in the forum’ in print on the page of the Observer, it just makes no sense at all. When you see the same words on the Internet you know to click on them and be taken to a page where you write your own comments about the show.

This is just another example of how difficult it is to trust Swazi journalism. What looks like a piece of independent journalism turns out to be copied from a commercial website.

Yesterday, the game was up. Anyone who bought both the Observer and the Times would see that their BBA2 articles were exactly the same. Word for word.

Both articles were about the non-story that there would be no evictions from the house this week. But (and how exciting is this?) the housemates don’t know.

It’s all public relations nonsense of course to try to drum up some drama about the BBA2 show, when none really exists.

I’d rather the newspapers gave us some real journalism about BBA2.

Here’s something they could find out for us. How many Swazis have been sending SMS text messages to the show (at E3.50 a time) and how much profit has the cell phone company MTS made as a result of this?

And what chance does a caller from Swaziland really have in deciding which housemate gets evicted?

WATCHING BIG BROTHER

On Sunday I saw some people having a meal (scrambled eggs, I think) and then one man poured himself a glass of water and drank it. Later, someone else took a broom and swept the floor of the kitchen while some others sat in the garden.

No, this wasn’t a typical Sunday at the Rooney homestead; this was a day in the life of Big Brother Africa 2 (BBA2).

BBA2 is the new ‘reality television’ show broadcast by satellite company, DSTV.

For those of you who have real lives of your own and haven’t been paying attention, BBA2 put 12 ‘housemates’ together in a house, locked them away from the world, and has had cameras following them for 24 hours a day.

Sunday was day 42 of their exploits. The series is scheduled to run for a total of 98 days.

From time to time, viewers are asked to nominate one of the housemates for eviction from the house. This goes on until viewers have voted everybody except one person off and that person is then declared the winner. The winner gets to go away with 100,000 US dollars (700,000 Swazi emalengeni).

This is only the second time that Big Brother Africa has been broadcast, but the programme format is not new. It started in the Netherlands in the1990s and local versions of the programme have been broadcast around the world since. It is now one of the most successful programme formats in the history of television.

Back in the 1990s, the programme makers made all kinds of claims for Big Brother. They said it was a social experiment to see how people would react to living so closely to one another without a break and for such a long period. Sociologists and psychologists rushed to praise the programme for its intellectual insights.

Nobody seriously says that kind of thing now. It didn’t take too long before the truth came out. The reality of this ‘reality television’ programme was money. That’s why it’s taken so long for Big Brother to get as far as Africa: there’s not much money to be made on this continent.

Here’s how it works. The BBA2 programme makers wanted 12 contestants from across Africa. Instead of auditioning people across the continent and taking the best people they could find they decided to look only in Africa’s richer nations. They didn’t bother to come to Swaziland.

BBA2 found its 12 contestants – with no more than one person from any single country so they could spread the interest in the programme around the continent. Countries represented include South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda and Botswana.

BBA2 is targeted at a very particular audience of young people. To be attractive to sponsors and advertisers the audience need to be in well paying jobs and have money to spend on the goods and services advertisers want to sell.

Advertisers who use television have trouble reaching younger adults, so BBA2 was aimed specifically at these kinds of people. BBA2 wants the audience to relate to the participants so they chose men and women to take part who come from a very narrow social demographic.

The 12 housemates range in ages from 21 to 30-years old, but most of them are aged 23 to 28. They don’t have run of the mill jobs in the real world. Two describe themselves as ‘authors’, one is a model and actress, another is a fashion designer and yet another is a ‘radio personality’. This range of occupations is hardly typical of the average African.

The cell phone company MTN sponsors the programme and must be rubbing its hands all the way to the bank because the other way they make money is by getting the television audience to send SMS text messages.

If you want to vote to evict a housemate you send an SMS message. If you SMS from Swaziland it’ll cost you 50 US cents (about E3.50). The other moneymaking scheme is to get viewers to SMS messages that get published on screen. Again, an SMS from Swaziland will cost you 50 US cents.

To get the messages flowing and to incite interest, BBA2 has manufactured conflict within the house. By clicking OK on screen you are taking to a ‘news’ centre where you can catch up on what’s been going on in the house for the past 40-odd days. Here you learn that the housemates have fallen out with each other and there are now two opposing camps who are fighting with one another.

Also, a couple (one male and one female) are said to be getting a bit hot and have been kissing and nuzzling one another.

On the afternoon I watched, these two pieces of ‘news’ excited most of the text messages. There was a constant stream of messages (at E3.50 a time) and as far as I noticed none of them were repeated.

So the companies behind BBA2 are making a lot of money out of this programme, but as viewers what are we getting? On Sunday, I switched off after an hour or so and went to read a book. When I switched back on an hour or so later, there was a man and a woman in the kitchen boiling a pan of water. Maybe it was time for tea.

When I lived in Papua New Guinea I watched a TV programme called Haus and Home where they showed viewers how to decorate a wall in your house by painting it. We then spent some time watching the paint dry.

Why did I suddenly remember that? ….

DSTV SCORES AN OWN GOAL

There are a lot of unhappy football (soccer) supporters in Swaziland. The start of the English Premier League (EPL) this month saw a reduction in the number of matches screened on SuperSport (part of the MultiChoice/DSTV satellite television service).

In what may turn out to be a public relations disaster, SuperSport promised in advertisements that subscribers would get more football this year. Instead, supporters in Swaziland of EPL (considered to be the top league in the world) will get to see fewer games. Even in South Africa, where SuperSport is based, viewers will be seeing fewer EPL matches than last season.

The reason (of course) for this is money. Competition for satellite television subscribers is increasing across sub-Saharan Africa and where in the past SuperSport had exclusive rights to screen the EPL in sub-Saharan Africa, from this season that has changed.

Now, no single pay-TV company in sub-Saharan Africa will be able to screen all of the EPL. The EPL has from this season been tiered into three packages: one with 80 per cent of the matches, one with 20 per cent and another with about 10 per cent which has been offered to free to air channels.

SuperSport in Swaziland has rights to the package with 20 per cent of the EPL games. The lists of exactly which games will be covered by the various packages is not made public so nobody knows if they will screen all the games that involve top teams like Manchester United, Arsenal, Chelsea or Liverpool.

MuliChoice/DSTV is facing greater competition for viewers this year. For example, GTV, a subsidiary of Gateway Communications, branched out this year into pay TV by starting satellite broadcasts in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania. The company soon plans to move into several other countries.

According to GTV there is a big untapped market for viewers in Africa. The goal of GTV is to reach 250,000 subscribers by the end of next year, and one million within three or four years. It plans to operate in up to 25 countries by the end of 2008.

Outside South Africa, where MultiChoice has 1.3 million customers, pay-TV has mostly been affordable only to a small elite and to international hotels. MultiChoice, a subsidiary of Naspers, a South African media conglomerate, has about 450,000 subscribers in sub-Saharan Africa outside South Africa, a region with a population of more than 700 million.

Other African pay-TV operators have only small national or regional presences. CanalSat Horizons, part of Canal Plus of France, is available in Francophone regions of West Africa, for instance.

In a region where even basic over-the-air television programming - not to mention colour sets or disposable incomes - is in short supply, many broadcasters assumed until recently that the market for pay-TV would also remain limited. But the rapid spread of mobile phones across Africa has persuaded them that there might be an opportunity in satellite television.

Following football is one thing, but actually watching matches is another. Pay-TV has been too expensive for most people, and many free, over-the-air broadcasters have been unable to afford sports rights.

But that may be changing. Some conventional broadcasters are starting to add football programming as international competitions increase and as organizations like the EPL break up rights packages that used to be sold as a block. This could be an opportunity for Swazi TV to make an inroad into EPL broadcasting.

DSTV: NOTHING LOCAL ABOUT IT

The news that satellite broadcaster DSTV has created a new ‘cheap’ priced package of channels has caused excitement in some quarters in Swaziland.

The so-called Family Bouquet allows people to access 20 television channels as well as radio and music stations. The news prompted Nathi Gule, the Times of Swaziland’s television writer to prophesise that Swaziland’s two indigenous television channels, Swazi Television and Channel S, would lose the majority of their viewers to DSTV as a result of this.

Critics have complained that Swaziland’s two channels bore viewers with constant repeats of programmes or uninteresting and irrelevant material.

I assume DSTV has introduced its low cost Family Bouquet because it realises that many potential customers across Africa, and not just in Swaziland, simply cannot afford the larger packages on offer. DSTV in its on screen self-promotions presently boasts that viewers can receive more than 70 channels (which I think you’d agree makes the new 20 channel package look like very small beer).

Although, I don’t want to spoil anyone’s viewing enjoyment, I am not convinced that the DSTV package is really in the best interests of the people of Swaziland.

The problem is none of the material on the satellite channels and hardly any on the two Swazi television stations is local. Instead, viewers are given a diet that consists mainly of sport, cheap American and British dramas, soap operas, mostly American movies, and lots and lots of ‘reality’ programmes and game shows.

Even Swazi TV and Channel S broadcast next to no programmes made in the kingdom. If you take away the daily news broadcasts and studio-based interview shows there is little left of a Swazi origin. American talk show hosts such as Oprah Winfrey get almost as much airtime as all the Swazi programming put together.

It is important for television stations to provide programmes that are created locally because these programmes deal with the community’s local needs, knowledge and experience that are relevant to the community. The whole process of creating and broadcasting local content provides opportunities for members of the community to interact with each other, expressing their own ideas, knowledge and culture in their own language

The Swazis who watch television are virtually inundated with information that is culturally irrelevant to them. Also, the programmes that are not made locally often reflect language, values and lifestyles, which are vastly different from those of the Swaziland community. Extreme examples of this are the soft porn movies that the DSTV channel Action X broadcasts late at night. (It is illegal to publish and distribute pornographic magazines in Swaziland).

Television should be about more than simply beaming foreign material into Swazi homes. Mass media that are available in Swaziland should have a role in helping the country to develop and contributing to social change. Instead, the foreign made programmes portray Westernized consumer culture as attractive to people in Swaziland, even though about 70 per cent of the population live below the poverty line.

What is really happening with DSTV, and to a lesser extent with the two Swazi TV channels, is that advertisers are deciding what gets shown. They want audiences with money to spend on the goods and services the advertisers wish to sell.

Where advertising becomes increasingly important as a source of revenue for media, entertainment packages of soap operas, music, and sports are central to attracting audiences. This is precisely the type of programming DSTV provides.

As a result Swaziland’s cultural values will be seriously damaged if Swazi children continue to be exposed to TV programmes with massive foreign content which do not promote Swaziland’s own cultural values. Today’s Swazi children are in danger of becoming ‘Anglo American’ in their mentality without ever setting foot in those countries, instead of identifying themselves with Swazi values and traditions.