Southern African Broadcasting Association (SABA) president and Director General of the Namibian Broadcasting Corporation, Stanley Similo said the SABA TV channel is ready to be launched within the next three months.
According to Similo in Swakopmund on Friday while giving a status update on the channel, the idea of SABA TV is to have a channel that will broadcast all types of local content coming from all the national broadcasters within SADC to tell the African story, by Africans.
“A lot of work has been done through travels to each Southern African Development Community (SADC) country, making sure that we have touched all the points and understood all the issues within the region so that we can bring forth a story that speaks to us as residents of the region,” he expressed.
The channel will be broadcasting nine hours daily with over 1 500 hours’ worth of content reportedly already available.
SABA TV chairperson for the SADC Content Committee Denis Chirwa expressed certainty that with the channel, Africa will understand SADC’s innovation, creativity and determination to come up with an idea “to change the continent”.
Director General of Tanzania Broadcasting Corporation Dr Ayub Rioba Chacha while commending the efforts by the SABA committee, expressed the concern of the current flow of imbalanced information on Africa as it is not done by the Africans themselves.
“We should have African journalists covering whatever is happening in Africa, using our own perspectives. Although there has been efforts in the past to establish an African journalists’ agency, they failed along the way and we should learn from these lessons to ensure that it does not happen to SABA TV and that we as Africans can finally tell our own stories,” he noted.
‘Eye on SADC’ is currently an already existing news programme which features news inserts from all SADC countries and are compiled and aggregated in Namibia, then relayed back to the different national broadcasters in SADC.
Once the channel starts running, SABA TV will get to a point where it will seek proposals from local producers to submit their content.
The channel will be accessible on each country’s local satellite transmission.
Source: The Namibian Press Agency
