By Bampia James Bundu
The new board chairman of the Sierra Leone Broadcasting Corporation, SLBC, Festus Minah, has identified politics, political interference and lack of funding as major problems affecting the smooth running of the corporation.
He said when he would have taken over the leadership of the public broadcaster the first move would be to hold a retreat that would further explore these and other challenges with a view to finding possible solutions. He admitted to serious administrative problems and pointed out that they would try to bridge the huge gap between the staff body and management.
The onetime civil society activist, who served on the management board of the SLBC before his recent appointment as chairman, had issue with the fact that funding from UNDP was never handed over to the management of the corporation to be used for their programmes.
“UNDP used their money by themselves and no audit report was shown to us. We were left with nothing”, he complained, adding that they had observed with keen interest the manner in which government ministries, departments and agencies went about doing their programs on television without paying for the services.
“This is another major problem. Almost all of these institutions have their media budgets which are supposed to be used for media activities. Unfortunately, they are not helping the corporation to grow because they use those monies and use free air time at the expense of SLBC”, he lamented.
He promised that this time around they would ensure they change the status quo and introduce new strategies to raise funds from some of their programmes and to sustain their operations.
He disclosed that the entire transformation process would still have lagged behind a bit because the corporation lacked the necessary equipment needed for its effective and efficient running. He assured that once this was sorted, by next year they would have transformed the corporation into the ideal and develop all programs to meet international standards.
Responding to the allegations against them, the UNDP told Politico that they had every reason to do what they did at the time.
“At the time the SLBC was created, being a new institution in transition from SLBS, it had no capacity for financial management. Therefore, UNDP had to use the direct implementation modality under which it procured all goods, works and services based on work plan agreed with the Government through the Ministry of Information and Communication”, the UN agency said in a short email response to our request for clarification.
(C) Politico 08/05/14
