Dr. Pieter Mulder, Consideration of the Broadcasting Amendment Bill - FF Plus declaration of vote, February 17 2009

The word democracy is abused by many countries which are not democratic at all. Communist East Germany was called the "German Democratic Republic"!

It is also easy to call yourself a democrat when your party has 70% of the vote. The real test comes when your party might loose power in the next election, or might loose control of a province and has to hand over the keys of the Union Buildings.

Do you keep to the rules and accept this or do you start al sorts of undemocratic actions to ensure that you stay in power? Mr Mugabe is a very good example of how this is done. This bill must be judged against that background.

The SABC is South Africa's public broadcaster. It is not the ANC or the governments' broadcaster. It is a public broadcaster with the public paying licences. This bill enables the ANC to get rid of the SABC board. Public interest is not the same as government interest or ANC interest.  The Freedom Front Plus supported the amendment but will vote against this bill.

The FF Plus wrote a letter to the President about those aspects of the Bill which we view to be unconstitutional. We are therefore grateful that the President had referred the Bill back and that the Bill had indeed been improved. The fact that the Bill could be improved, once again proves the important role that opposition parties play in Parliament. Unfortunately the amendments are insufficient to rectify the essence of the problem of this Bill.

Democracy is not only the right to be allowed to vote regularly and to express your views freely. Institutions such as the courts, the media and the public broadcaster are instruments which play an important role to maintain a true democracy. If a government starts fiddling with these instruments to make them submissive to the government of the day, then alarm bells start ringing. This is exactly what is happening with this amendment of the Bill. The ANC government obtains the right with this Bill to hold a sword over the head of the Public Broadcaster and specifically the SABC Board. If SABC Board Members do not act in the interest of the ruling party, then the sword will swing and the specific SABC Board Member will be gotten rid of.

Issued by the Freedom Front Plus, February 17 2009