Hi all. It’s been over a year, and I keep getting asked when (or if) I’ll ever get around to blogging again. The answer is: I’m not blogging, but I am writing. This gives me little reason to blog and some good reasons not to.

Most Thursdays (and occasionally at other times) you can find a column on technology or telecommunications at ITWeb. Every Tuesday, my column on politics, economics and (anti-)environmentalism is published at the phoenix that rose from the ashes of Branko Brkic’s dearly departed Maverick magazine: The Daily Maverick. I also still write a monthly column for Brainstorm magazine, where the then-editor Brkic first convinced me to write opinion, and where current editor Samantha Perry continues to tolerate my invariably overdue mutterings.

Here’s what I’ve been up to since I stopped blogging, written while The Daily Maverick was still in pre-launch beta testing: Going cold turkey.

Since its launch, I’ve taken up one of my favourite cudgels: Too late to cool it? This week I penned a piece on the temerity of leftwingers who claim to oppose fascism: The irony of the left. I have many ideas lined up to fuel future arguments, so keep an eye on The Daily Maverick. Moreover, it is home to an eclectic group of brilliant reporters, photographers, analysts, commentators and columnists who offer some of the finest reading matter available on the South African internet. It is a pleasure and an honour to be published alongside them.

Elsewhere, this rant on power plugs for Brainstorm magazine elicited some vigorous nodding from readers, many of whom, unsurprisingly, share my pain.

Though a promising challenger has recently appeared (here’s to you, Duncan McLeod), ITWeb has for 15 years been the backbone and daily staple of the South African tech and telecoms scene. Among my recent ITWeb columns are an opinion about which commenters appeared to miss the point somewhat: Sure, fund the SABC with tax, an argument about who might be producing primary reporting in the future: Reviving the leisured classes, and a story about a man, The chief incompetence officer, which may yet have repercussions.

Discussion of or comments on my columns are best posted on the publishers’ respective sites, not only because they buy my bread and beer, but also because I’m more likely to read and respond there. I’ll post alerts of new articles and columns over here, however, so the many friends (and enemies) I’ve made here can follow me wherever I write. Speaking of following, I’m @IvoVegter.

Of course, the archives remain intact, and contain some 218 041 words in 520 posts, with 1 331 comments. Some of the topics I tackled, or responses I promised (but never wrote) will no doubt surface again on ITWeb, in Brainstorm or on The Daily Maverick.

Thank you all for reading and, most importantly, arguing with me. You’ve been a whetstone for my blade: sharpening my arguments, but innocent of how rashly I wield them. You rock — dangerous communists included.

A calamity is unfolding. A disaster wrought, not surprisingly, by the lack of a free market in broadcasting in South Africa. I’ll quote from local rock DJ Benjy Mudie’s webpage:

Dear Rock of Ages listeners & fans,

Those of you that were listening to the show last Thursday would have heard the sad news that Rock of Ages is coming off the air at the end of March 2008. Radio 2000 has advised me that they are not going to extend the show’s contract and so after nearly 5 years of playing the best in classic and new ‘retro’ rock, both international and local, South Africa’s only rock show, Rock of Ages, will broadcast it’s last show on Thursday 27th March 2008.

There has been an outpouring of disappointment and anger at this decision and scores of listeners have emailed the station voicing their unhappiness and I understand that there are several petitions doing the rounds as well. If you would like to have your say on this please email the Program Manager of Radio 2000, Cuthbert Mashigo at cuthbert@radio2000.co.za. I would respectfully appeal to you to keep your comments polite, non-personal and non-political. I’m not sure if the protests will result in a reversal of this decision, all things are possible ….. however the important thing is that you have the right to speak out if you should choose, the SABC is a public broadcaster and as such is accountable to the people.

What is it with the SABC and rock music? Even PW Botha’s censors had more respect for rock. (Or maybe it just scared them.)

This is a disgrace. And a disappointment. It’s sad. And you and I pay with our tax and TV licence money for the SABC. You do pay your TV licence, don’t you?

But even if you don’t, it’s not like Benjy can get together with the likes of Chris Prior, Neil Johnson, Phil Wright, Rafe Levine, Leon Economides, and David Blood and start a rock/blues/jazz/metal station of their own. You can’t get frequency without the government’s permission. The state-owned SABC sits on most of it, and has no incentive to use it more efficiently.

You also can’t get a broadcasting licence without the government’s permission, and the government decides “what the market can bear”. Since when? Why shouldn’t the market decide what the market can bear? I’d reckon there’s a pretty reasonable niche market for rock, and it’d do just fine, especially if you spice it with some blues and jazz. You’d reach a pretty diverse audience, too, from teenage rockers to old hippies who would have remembered the sixties if they hadn’t been there, from avant-garde black professionals to angry white metalheads, from alternative and goth chicks to midlife-crisis bikers. But if I’m wrong, or these people have no money to spend on advertised products, why shouldn’t a rock station be allowed to go bust if it turns out there’s no market for it?

Here’s the text of my own e-mail to Mr Mashigo:

The last time I felt driven to write to a radio station I had to use a fax machine, because e-mail wasn’t around. That was in 1993, to express my disgust that Radio 5 was firing Chris Prior, who at that time had by far the best rock show on radio. I still enjoy the home-made tapes I made of his features as a teenager. In fact, the bulk of my education in music is thanks to Chris Prior, yet the SABC unceremoniously dumped him.

Then Benjy Mudie picked up the baton with his excellent Rock of Ages show, introducing listeners to excellent music, both old and new, that simply doesn’t get airplay anywhere else.

Now I hear his show may be cancelled.

Because of our restrictive licencing regime, it simply isn’t possible to create new genre-based radio stations in the vein of Classic FM, which means that SABC Radio, as the public-service broadcaster, has a responsibility to cater for all needs and tastes not covered by commercial stations. It also has the resources to do so on a channel like Radio 2000, which is usually given over to sport commentary or simply anonymous auto-queued music (good though it often is).

Other than the occasional news and talk radio, I do not listen to any music radio other than Benjy’s excellent show. I feel like I belong, there. It would be a great shame were it to be taken off air. It would also be contrary to the SABC’s public service mandate, I suspect. Since I pay tax and TV licences, and a private rock station won’t get licenced in a month of Sundays, this is most distressing.

Let’s help Benjy get back on air. Thursday evenings won’t be the same without him. E-mail Mashigo now.

Update: Leon Economides, who used to present the Priority Feature with Chris Prior in the good old days, commented to point out where radio rock hides these days in South Africa. It’s like the late 1960s in the States. AM only. Groovy, and all that. Thanks, Leon.

Hands up who thought I was being sarcastic. Sorry to disappoint. Eddie Funde and Dali Mpofu, respectively chairman and CEO of the South African public broadcaster, are right on the money with their latest statements.

According to Computing SA, they’re calling for more public funding for the SABC, and less reliance on commercial revenue.

“It is very unusual for the public broadcaster to be 80% commercially funded,” Funde says. “It is very hard for the public broadcaster to fulfil its mandate and at the same time have to go around and looking for money. We are working very hard to change that situation.”

If you’re going to have a state-owned public broadcaster (the value of which is an entirely different argument), it should be funded not from advertising revenue, but from tax. The problem with permitting the SABC to sell advertising is that it drains a great deal of potential revenue from commercial broadcasters. This makes it hard for them to compete, which results in a perceived market failure, which in turn causes a slow, steady expansion of the SABC’s presumed mandate.

I don’t see the value in a public broadcaster that shows bargain-bin movies, American soap operas and late-night sleaze. What possible public purpose does that serve? Public broadcasting should be educational. It should promote the arts. It should give a leg-up to local productions. It should screen stuff that isn’t commercially viable for private broadcasters. That means that it shouldn’t contribute to making things commercially non-viable by leeching advertising revenue out of the private sector.

That, in turn, means it should be entirely funded by public money. And since TV licence fees are inherently regressive, not to mention expensive to administer, this means funding it from the tax coffers. This change will narrow its mandate and focus its efforts. It will curb scope creep. Instead of dragging down the aggregate quality of South African television, it might even raise the overall standard.

It’s not the only change I’d like to see in the broadcast sector. Issuing broadcast licences to all qualifying applicants, regardless of whether they compete with the SABC’s free-to-air model, instead of artificially limiting their number according to what the government guesses the market will bear, would be another. But funding the SABC from taxes alone would be a great leap forward. If you’ll excuse the expression.

You know, you’d think that the news director of the country’s public broadcaster would bristle at accusations that he’s just a government spin doctor. That he’d protest that yes, he used to be the communications man for a government department, but what journalist hasn’t stooped to PR to pay the rent on occasion, and anyway, you can’t assume someone would have any obligations to past employers.

Not Snuki Zikalala. He revels in it. The Times has the story: No news is good news, says Comrade Snuki.

The SABC would not have broadcast stories about Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang’s behaviour during her hospital treatment, or on her conviction for theft for stealing a watch from an unconscious patient — because the public broadcaster only carries stories that aid the country’s development.

“We are guided by the constitution not to incite violence or hatred in our reporting, said Snuki Zikalala, the SABC’s chief of news yesterday.

“Publishing such a story is disrespectful.”

You know, all this wouldn’t be such a problem, if people could realistically be expected to ignore it, and switch to a more wholesome news station. If the SABC wasn’t the dominant player in a small government-protected cartel. Market forces don’t act very robustly when the government only permits a single free-to-air licence holder to compete with the SABC. When the owners of any device that can receive TV signals must pay mandatory TV licence fees which go to the SABC. When new competition cannot arise without an invitation from the Minister of Communications, and then is likely to be required by law to charge fees from their viewers, or even agree in their licence conditions not to carry news at all.

I suppose people could switch to non-TV media. But is this a realistic expectation? The fact is that there’s no robust competition against the SABC in the huge middle- and lower-income demographic, so the government’s propaganda outlet is virtually guaranteed to find a huge audience. And while their income might be lower, their votes count just the same.

(Hat tip: Sarah Britten, who recently started a Facebook group on the subject of media freedom in South Africa.)

“The press is a machine, it doesn’t have any freedom. Freedom belongs to the people, they have a right to make choices.” — Dali Mpofu, CEO of the state-owned South African Broadcasting Corporation, quoted in the Mail & Guardian.

More funnies in the same story, from Snuki Zikalala i’Afrika, the government spin-doctor turned SABC news director who has undisclosed information on the dipso klepto health minister that differs from everyone else’s, and Ronald Suresh Roberts, the presidential hagiographer who thinks journalists harbour subversive fantasies involving baked beans and trespassing on the body of said minister.

The “unauthorised” documentary about South African president Thabo Mbeki, on which I noted Jean Barker’s column, has finally been screened on the SABC, after more than a year of to-ing and fro-ing.

It is interesting, and does a very good job at recalling much detail that may have been forgotten, or may not have been generally known to those who don’t count biographies among their mandatory daily reading.

It remembers, in former Sunday Times and current City Press editor Mathatha Tsedu’s words, the “Gucci revolutionary”. It sketches the same younger Mbeki whom I remember when I did sound for him at Wits University in (or about) 1991: charming, urbane, moderate, cool. (I doubt he’ll remember me. Since then he saved my neck, and though on that occasion he was equally disarming and impressive, I doubt he’ll remember that either. If I can extract the photo to prove it from my dead camera, I’ll post it.)

Made by Ben Cashdan, Redi Direko and Meril Rasmussen, the film starts on an interesting note: Nelson Mandela warns him, at his election as ANC (and therefore ultimately South Africa’s) president that the temptation to “settle scores” and “marginalise” detractors will attend him who wins the power of office unopposed, as Mbeki did. The camera goes to Mbeki, who doesn’t laugh, but looks askance. Is he rolling his eyes? Why does this paternal lesson need to be delivered in public, from a stage?

Read the rest of this entry »

Cartoonist Zapiro recently pictured the South African Broadcasting Corporation as the SANC, reflecting its political control by the ruling African National Congress through its appointees, CEO Dali Mpofu and news director Snuki Zikalala:

Jean Barker, at 24.com Entertainment, writes that often, censorship is more interesting than a film or book itself, “publicising the very film it was intended to make disappear”, and reviews some films that the SABC has declined to show. She recognises that this doesn’t technically amount to “banning”, but that the effect is for practical purposes similar. Hanging her story on Unauthorised: Thabo Mbeki, which the SABC cancelled at the last minute, Barker writes:

“Winners write history,” as the saying goes. And the ANC won the struggle, or the War on Apartheid, at least politically speaking. Now, films like Cry Freedom and Come Back, Africa aren’t rebel yells, they’re a record of our history. And the ANC-aligned SABC is doing its own censorship. While it could be said, correctly in some cases, that they’ve chosen not to show stuff because it’s just bloody boring, sometimes it’s not clear whether it’s really their right to decide for us what’s interesting.

She selects four films, two from the Apartheid era, and two from the ANC era, to illustrate a thought-provoking point.

I think this piece is an exceptionally funny take on politics and the media in South Africa.

Gotta love the closing quotation in a Sunday Times article posted on MyBroadband about the latest scandal to rock the SABC:

“We would like it to be taken into consideration that the nature of certain of the allegations in the report involving us may be phrased in a particular way to create atmosphere.”

Whatever, dude. I’m sure the R1.9 million you’re alleged to have scammed from the SABC will pay for air conditioning.