The South African Broadcasting Corporation has branded most of us as criminals. It's time to cut the brat's allowance...
THERE'S been an ominous change of tone in the SABC's campaign to get most of us to buy TV licences. Gone are the polite cartoons and the gently chiding pleas. Instead, the SABC now declares "Shoplifting is a crime, burglary is a crime, not paying your TV licence is a crime...."
Do you think it will go so far as to put us in jail? Yes, if it follows the example of the Brits. A chilling statistic that I picked up from The Economist says that 14% of all women in British jails are there for the single offence of not paying their TV licence fees.
Now I own a television set, but I do not pay a licence fee to the SABC. So I guess that puts me in the same category as hijackers and murderers.
I don't watch television. I have an extensive collection of movies and music on LaserDisc which I watch whenever I can spare the time. The LaserDisc player plays through my TV set. Since I never make use of SABC's facilities, I deny it the right to charge me for usage.
But there's a more fundamental principle involved. Should an organisation which competes for a share of the same advertising market as this newspaper, radio stations and M-Net be subsidised by the taxpayer?
In Bill Clinton's country, there is no such thing as a TV licence fee. The broadcast TV stations pay their own way with advertising revenue.
It's cutthroat competition. They have to be good to survive. They have no large pot of unearned cash extorted at gunpoint from helpless victims. Yes, gunpoint, for what is a threat of arrest if not a threat to call down the might of the state against an individual?
The programming on American broadcast channels is pathetic pandering to the lowest common denominator carefully vetted to ensure political correctness.
So what? The SABC buys the very same programmes, having decided that more sophisticated British humour is not suited to South African tastes.
Now I can see hackles raising already among the policymakers of Auckland Park. What about the need for nation building? For educational programming? For ensuring that all national languages get their fair share?
My answers are simple.
Nation building cannot be extorted. I am deeply committed to nation building, but I will do it my way, not at gunpoint.
Declare the airwaves open. If there is a market for Zulu programming, let everyone in on the action. Advertisers will pay for it. Ditto for all other official languages and some others - such as the Indian languages and Portuguese - that have a ready audience.
Educational programming? That should be paid for out of the education budget. And the minister of education should be able to allocate such money to areas where it can be most effective.
This does not necessarily mean TV. It can also mean providing Internet access to schools, or expanding existing initiatives such as the Daily News Learn supplement.
We need to take these steps now, to put our national communications infrastructure in step with the rest of the world, because the computer age has been here for a decade, and we haven't noticed it.
RealAudio software allows PC to PC transmission of broadcast quality audio over regular telephone lines. This means that every computer on the Internet is capable of being a private radio station.
Since computer power doubles almost every one and a half years, within five years, we can expect every computer on the Internet to be able to function as a private TV station at the same cost as a modern multimedia PC.
And at that point, would anyone bother switching on SABC when they could have CNN's news teams in this country providing us with local news tailored for our market and paid for by our advertisers?
And is Auckland Park then going to insist that we pay a TV licence for every computer sold? Because the Macintosh computers that sit on my desk and many others at Natal Newspapers certainly do not know the difference. They have built-in studio quality audio and video, at the same price as last year's model without these features.
The SABC's claim to TV licence fees must be stamped out now. It is a dog that bites the hand that feeds it. It must either crawl into its kennel or be put down.