Minister and Parliament stand for SABC censorship!
24 August 2016
R2K is outraged by Parliament's decision to let the SABC off the hook, and abandoning the proposal for an inquiry into the crisis at the SABC. ANC MPs on the committee have been complicit in the decline of our public broadcaster and have acted in bad faith, failing to exercise their publicly entrusted responsibilities in ensuring an accountable SABC Board. Parliament has a crucial oversight role in terms of the Broadcasting Act and MPs must ensure that the broadcaster is publicly accountable. Yet at yesterday's committee meeting, spineless MPs squandered the chance to rescue the SABC and chose to remain deaf to the public outcry at what is happening to our broadcaster. This is nothing short of a dereliction of duty and those MPs who have turned a blind eye to the SABC crisis ought to be recalled.
R2K has further noted Minister Faith Muthambi's response to our pickets outside Parliament and the Department of Communications on August 23, in which she claims that our intention was simply to divert attention away from the Department's Media Transformation Colloquium to be held later this week. She also took the opportunity to make the risible claim that R2K is opposed to media transformation.
We need not entertain this baseless claim at any length here. A simple glance at our website will show that we have long been fighting for media transformation since our inception as a campaign. If Minister Muthambi is seriously committed to media transformation then she should take meaningful steps towards realising some of the key media transformation objectives we have demanded. These include:
1. Strengthening public broadcasting!