Reflecting on Two Decades of Strategic Choices: A Practitioners Examination of SABC Public Service Radio Product Management from 1996 to 2016

This chapter undertakes a historical analysis of the on-air product of the public service radio of the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) over two decades. The aim is to establish the strategic choices the SABC radio management made regarding the on-air product during that period. Before the 1994 democratic elections, the SABC was a state broadcaster used as part of the colonial and apartheid authorities’ strategies of oppressing the black majority. But, by 2016, the media landscape had changed significantly, with the radio environment becoming a vibrant, competitive industry, though not yet a mature market. The analysis is viewed from the perspective of the SABC senior and middle management and supervisory levels’ strategic decisions, as they grappled with the challenges of the different epochs between 1996 and 2016, which include the transition from the apartheid era to the new democratic political dispensation. The chapter draws from the theories of media content in the concrete form of the message and media strategic management of media products. It traces the SABC public service radio stations through four strategic approaches over the period in their quest to deliver on the public service radio mandate. In considering 100 years of radio broadcasting in South Africa, the twenty-year period between 1996 and 2016 is significant because this was the time during which the SABC was shaking off its legacy as a mouthpiece of the government and coming into its own as a public service broadcaster that would centre the voices of all South Africans.