Political Perspective

I’M not sure I agree with any of the political parties regarding the NBC free airtime issue. It is a very complex matter, because those of us in the (private) media know how difficult it is to practically give equal coverage, even if one wants to do it in principle in an attempt to be fair to all. There will always be more pressure on publicly owned media – simply because they are taxpayer funded – on the allocation of free airtime when it comes to elections.

THIS week two opposition parties, namely the Rally for Democracy and Progress (RDP) and the Congress of Democrats (CoD) went to court demanding equal airtime for all parties contesting the elections. The NBC’s original policy was that 40 per cent of the time available for campaign broadcasts would be divided equally among the 14 parties contesting the elections, while the other 60 per cent would be divided proportionally among the nine parties which contested the 2004 elections, divided along the lines of the share of the vote they received back then. All rather clumsy and administratively quite unmanageable, I would think.And as the two parties went to court, the NBC retaliated by withdrawing the offer of free airtime for all the parties, with the result now that many of the smaller opposition groups are up in arms with the RDP and CoD for taking this issue on in court in the first place, and blaming them for the NBC action to cease the free airtime.The RDP and CoD were quite entitled to take this to court. After all, they did it in their own right and at their own cost. Had they succeeded in their application, all parties would have got equal coverage and they probably wouldn’t have complained about that. But because the NBC pulled the rug, the RDP and CoD are now being blamed, rather than the NBC itself and/or the ruling party which surely was party to the NBC decision, since the latter resorts under the Ministry of Information, Broadcasting and Communication Technology and we all know where and with whom the Minister stands!The original complex NBC airtime allocation undoubtedly gave Swapo the lion’s share of free time. Again, there would be differing opinions around this. While it is true to say that the ruling party probably has the biggest budget of all those parties contesting the elections, they also have the biggest following, and a two-thirds majority presence in Parliament. So either way, free airtime or not, Swapo would get the biggest slice simply by virtue of its majority status on the one hand, and its financial resources on the other.I guess the equal airtime concept proposed by the RDP and CoD could have worked. That is, for party-political broadcasts. The NBC could have made more of a quota system with regard to the news coverage of the 14 parties, and that would then have assured that while all parties had an equal shot at putting their messages across in their free airtime, in terms of news coverage there would have been a more proportional system. But all the parties, and I probably risk their ire in saying this, need to campaign for votes, and in this regard there’s nothing better than contact with the people themselves. Party broadcasts and messages may help give them profile, but people are not going to vote for them unless they know who and what they’re voting for. And I know it is not necessarily the easiest thing for smaller parties to do this, if they haven’t got funding and resources to get to the people in the first place, which may take us back in turn to the survival of the fittest theory.Yes, we do want political pluralism (i.e. choices for the electorate in terms of political parties) but 14 is quite a lot for any nation to deal with, and to be brutally honest, I’m not sure that a lot of these will have any pull among the people for various, and some fairly obvious, reasons. Some of these groupings, like it or not, are simply thrown together for the sake of it, and I don’t think that all 14 have any real raison d’etre.Be that as it may, I guess the operative principle here should be, if not some kind of equality, then certainly fairness towards all, and in a way, it is a pity the NBC decided on the route they chose, because it is rather churlish and has now left many of the smaller groupings high and dry.But these parties objecting to the RDP/CoD court application need also to think their stance through. It really doesn’t make sense for them to blame the two which went to court. They were, after all, going on their own behalf and not on the part of all opposition parties in Namibia, and had they succeeded, all the splinter groups would have benefited too.No reason why the NBC can’t try and accommodate the multiplicity of our democracy, most importantly on radio. Let these opposition groups at least have a chance to get their message out without having to pay a price they can’t afford.