Cape Town - The South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) will no longer feed South Africans with a steady diet of old programmes and repeats during the second quarter of this financial year.
The announcement was made by Communications Minister Faith Muthambi, while delivering the Department’s Budget Vote, in Parliament, on Friday.
“We are also pleased to announce that during the second quarter of this financial year, the SABC will cease to flight international content repeats. This will be replaced by South African content, where South Africans will be telling their own stories in their own languages.
“While we welcome the good work by the SABC team, we also bemoan the continued inadequate funding of the Corporation,” she said.
In this regard, Minister Muthambi said work is underway to develop different funding model options for the SABC.
“We are evaluating the available funding models, including direct government funding, advertising, and the television license fee as possible sources of increased funding for the SABC,” she said.
Minister Muthambi said the SABC remains South Africa’s most accessible broadcaster and therefore government must continue to support it to discharge its public broadcasting service mandate.
She also welcomed the announcements by President Jacob Zuma during his Budget Vote debate where he stated that the public broadcaster will also be engaging local television content producers on the way forward, with regards to new content commissioning.
The SABC has moved swiftly to meet and engage the local television content producers on Wednesday.
This initiative, she said, will result in the appointment of commissioning editors in all nine provinces where shooting and packaging of the content will be done in the respective provinces.
She further described this as a radical shift from how the SABC used to commission content wherein the shooting and packaging used to happen in main cities.
“As announced by the President, we will work with the Department of Trade and Industry which has established a Black Emerging Filmmakers Fund, which aims to assist in bridging the inequality gap for filmmakers in South Africa.
“This initiative by the SABC will go a long way towards preservation of culture, tradition and heritage,” she said.
The SABC has been allocated R182.2 million to fund the operations of Channel Africa, its capital infrastructure programme, community radio stations and programme production. - SAnews.gov.za
