The regulations around language and local content for community radio stations are puzzling. Why impose them (or require radio stations to seek explicit exemption), when for the most part, radio stations voluntarily broadcast considerably more than the required quota?
Why create regulations that are so blatantly unnecessary?
Ivo Vegter, ITWeb contributor
Many community radio stations broadcast exclusively in local languages other than English. Many devote almost all their time to local music and local artists. The government's regulations address a problem that doesn't exist. This was made clear as long ago as 2005, when the regulator raised local content quotas, because, it said, most stations were exceeding the new quota already, anyway. It was so bad that a local record company complained not that local radio stations weren't buying enough local records, but that they had trouble supplying the demand for high-quality local music.
Why create regulations that are so blatantly unnecessary?
This not only creates problems for a few stations that have to jump through hoops because, for example, there's not a great deal of rock music in Sotho, or few local artists sing Cantonese.
It generates resentment towards a bureaucratic government that is seen to stick its nose everywhere it doesn't belong. Manage spectrum, and then get out of the way so the market can decide which radio stations succeed and which fail. Clearly, local content is not an area of “market failure”, no matter how hard the bureaucrats try to find this mythical beast under every rock that looks big enough to regulate.
Besides confusion and disrespect for bureaucratic nonsense, such superfluous regulations merely create paperwork for broadcasters. Regulatory compliance costs money and time. Requiring detailed records to verify compliance with local music, artist interviews and other content requirements makes no sense when the majority are clearly compliant by default.
There's probably a reason a “community radio station” is not called “commercial”. It's probably running on a shoestring. It probably scrapes by in a rented two-room office with a handful of DJs, a manager and a do-it-all-technician-and-receptionist. Dumping heavy piles of bureaucratic paperwork on such small operations is a sure-fire way to smother the baby in the crib.
If that is the objective of the regulations, it wouldn't be surprising. You see, there's another reason to drop the content requirements issued to private radio stations. The SABC, that beacon of efficient public service, is supported by TV licence fees that are enforced by criminal (not civil) law. The purpose of a public broadcaster is to achieve objectives that private broadcasters will not achieve, because... well, to put it bluntly, people might not really care to have nanny-state citizen education campaigns, content-as-a-patriotic-duty, or ruling party propaganda shoved down their throats.
However, the SABC is a huge black hole for advertising revenue, leaving the private media industry starved and casting about for whatever interstellar dust hasn't been sucked up by the SABC (or that other monster created by the government's love of exclusive licensing, MultiChoice).
This is double-dipping. If you're going to hurt private broadcasters by foisting a lumbering, inefficient, uncompetitive giant like the SABC on them, don't compound the misery - and destroy your justification for funding a public broadcaster in the first place - by requiring them to take on the very responsibilities for which the SABC exists.
The solution is simple. As a bonus it will ease the workload about which regulators so often complain - as if those burdened by their regulations are supposed to have sympathy.
The solution is to lift all broadcasting restrictions and obligations from broadcast licence owners. Make sure they don't trample on other people's radio spectrum, don't defraud advertisers, pay their taxes, and otherwise act lawfully, but let them play what they want to, say what they want to, and make money how they want to.
The bureaucrats might think otherwise, but most of us truly appreciate local content. This is why most radio stations proudly play it, promote it, and make their facilities available to local artists. Many others proudly broadcast in the home languages of local communities, not because they have to, but because people love speaking and listening to their own languages.
Afrikaans once became a sterile, dead language, thanks to an oppressive government that felt it had to force people to speak it. It came alive again when independent artists, freed of state support, reclaimed it as their own.
Now that South Africa is supposedly free, are we going to be forced once again by a patronising state to love our own music, and speak our own languages? If so, it will become a duty. We will learn to hate it, and despise the government that tells us how to live.
To put it in more revolutionary terms: Hands off our radio!
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