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The South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) has accused blogger Thinus Ferreira of attempting to cause “racial and linguistic divisions” following posts claiming the SABC’s programming decisions are marginalising the Afrikaans language.
Ferreira yesterday claimed the SABC had dropped the Afrikaans language half-hour news bulletin known as “Nuus om 7” for a week due to programming clashes occasioned by the coverage of the football World Cup.
Today Ferreira said the SABC plans to move all remaining Afrikaans language programmes from the SABC2 channel to the smaller SABC3.
“The SABC is getting ready to dump almost all of the remaining Afrikaans language shows still left on SABC2 and will move this Afrikaans programming to SABC3 – a channel with a much smaller footprint – meaning that Afrikaans is getting marginalised even further as an overall broadcasting language on SABC terrestrial television,” Ferreira said.
“I can reveal that the SABC will permanently move its sole terrestrial, daily, Afrikaans language TV news bulletin, Nuus om 7, from SABC2 to SABC3 once the SABC’s coverage of the 2014 FIFA World Cup concludes.
“It will also be the first time in 38 years that there won’t be any Afrikaans TV drama on SABC2 (the former TV1) since television began in South Africa in 1976.”
The SABC today refuted Ferreira’s claims the programming changes are intended to marginalise the Afrikaans language, and expressed its “misgivings” about Ferreira’s online posts, saying they are intended to incite racial and language-based tensions.
“The Cape Town based self-proclaimed TV critic, Mr Thinus Ferreira’s article is questionable and is perceived by the SABC as a move to cause confusion and to some extent instigate racial and linguistic divisions,” said the SABC.
“The article alleges that SABC will move its Afrikaans programming to SABC3 in order to further marginalise the Afrikaans language. This is not a true reflection of the state of affairs, as the SABC has not marginalised any language and will not do that in the future.”
While Ferreira claimed the SABC did not communicate changes to programming to its viewing audience in advance, the broadcaster said it “refutes this allegation with the contempt it deserves”.
According to the SABC, a press conference was held in May setting out the changes to TV schedules to make space for World Cup coverage, with a televised announcement aired to the viewing public, as well as statements being made available to the media detailing the changes.
The broadcaster claims Ferreira was also sent the media statement in advance.
Further, the SABC pointed to the fact that other language programmes have also been moved to accommodate the football tournament.
“The Xitsonga, SiSwati, IsiNdebele and Venda news have also been moved from SABC2, and there is no mention of this on Ferreira’s article. We strongly believe that all South Africans are equally important,” said the SABC, adding it always conducts extensive market research when deciding to move scheduled programmes, with changes only made according to “strategic need”.
“This week, the mostly watched Sesotho current affairs programme on SABC2, Leihlo la Sechaba, will not be playing and it is rather disturbing that Mr Ferreira singles out only the Afrikaans programmes. This is viewed in a serious light as it indicates that his report is subjective and is intended to suit a certain agenda only known to him,” the broadcaster said.
“In this particular case, the Afrikaans news and many other programmes were affected by the fact that the World Cup matches were playing at the same time, thus, we used SABC1 and SABC3 channels to broadcast the matches.”
