Icasa must rule on Snuki despite his departure

The abuse, for political gain, of state institutions has claimed yet another victim, but this time it is someone whose departure few will mourn — Snuki Zikalala.

Zikalala’s television news obituary, on the SABC’s 7pm news bulletin on April 28, was ignominiously short — a few sentences announcing that his contract would not be renewed and ending on an ironic note: “Cosatu has welcomed the decision.”

The ANC Youth League was more forthright in its response to Zikalala’s departure: “The ANCYL supports a public broadcaster that broadcasts and spreads news in a fair and equitable fashion, not what Snuki Zikalala was doing. The ANCYL says good riddance to Snuki Zikalala and wishes him the best on whatever career path he pursues, hoping it will not be in the media. The SABC has an opportunity now to uproot the remaining biased and factional reporters who continue to distort news in favour of specific political parties.”

It will be interesting to see whether this in any way prompts the alleged watchdog of the broadcasting industry, Icasa, to deliver judgement on the hearing it granted to the Freedom of Expression Institute and the Friends of the SABC on Zikalala’s blacklisting of media commentators he considered critical of former president Thabo Mbeki in particular and the ANC in general.

Icasa reserved judgement more than a month ago and has not been heard from since. It is beginning to look as though they may well have kicked for touch in anticipation of this predictable outcome. Hopefully they will now feel less constrained and can announce the conclusions they have, hopefully and presumably, now reached.

The matter is hardly complex. In 2006, the Sowetan broke the news that Zikalala had blacklisted a number of media personalities and commentators who he considered were not praise singers for Mbeki. The SABC predictably denied it but fell short when John Perlman confirmed these practices in an on-air interview with corporation spokesperson Kaiser Kganyago.

The SABC’s shortcomings were further exposed in the subsequent commission of inquiry headed by Zwelakhe Sisulu and advocate Gilbert Marcus who took evidence from numerous staff members such as Perlman, former head of radio news, Pippa Green, and Special Assignment reporter Jacques Pauw — all of whom subsequently resigned.

Sisulu and Marcus were greatly assisted in this by Zikalala himself who informed them that he had banned William Mervin Gumede from SABC programmes even though he had not read Gumede’s book, Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC. (Zebra Press, 2005)

He also informed the inquiry that he had banned contributions from a Jewish reporter, Paula Slier — who had started her broadcast news career with the SABC in Johannesburg and now reports for a Russian television news network from the Middle East — “because in the movement I come from we support the PLO”. The commissioners found that this was “improper and against SABC policy” and “motivated by a political position … which has no place in a public broadcaster”.

There were also numerous other examples as a result of which the commissioners justifiably found that Zikalala had repeatedly been in breach of the SABC’s code of news ethics, not to mention section 192 of the Constitution which safeguards access to information, section 10(1) D of the Broadcast Act which makes it incumbent on the SABC to report the news in a neutral and objective matter and, by the way, Icasa’s code of conduct for broadcasters.

The SABC, in response to the FXI/Friends of the SABC application to Icasa, flatly denied that Zikalala had manipulated the SABC’s news content for political purposes yet somehow decided to terminate his contract. That is a done deal.

In the meantime, we still await Icasa’s finding before some other vital area of government or public service is Snukied.