Watch! Zola 7 Weighs In On SA Television And Radio Preferring American Content Over Our Own Creativity: “We Simply Lack Patriotism”

Zola 7 Weighs In On SA Television And Radio Preferring American Content Over Our Own Creativity: “We Simply Lack Patriotism” – Bonginkosi Dlamini, aka Zola, is a South African poet, actor, and kwaito musician. He also presents Zola 7, a television show named for him, on SABC 1.

He took to social media on the 9th March 2020 to share his thoughts on the content being distributed in our televisions and radio broadcast. We are supposedly in a democratic country, but our content does not represent that notion. This is a cry of so many artists in our cry alongside Zola, who expressed his perspective and the reasons behind the dilemma.

“It comes with those foreign ideas, sometimes when we invade a country we do not need to take guns there you can just Little Wayne send him with Birdman and Drake, you can change a country completely mentally.“

“That’s why those artists look richer than, they look better than us and they get more airplay than us, they are more South African than we are, unfortunately on radio and on TV because we simply lack patriotism.

South Africa’s music community is coming out strongly against the state broadcaster, calling for an urgent change in policy to ensure that more local content and less American music is played on local radio.

And we have not conquered Tv and change it and it sells ideas of African, sells ideas of South Africa, then the grown-up are going to continue saying the youth is lost. People who put content on TV and people who put content on radio are actually grown-ups who feel the need to hype up American music and hype up American comedy and America soapies against the creativity of South Africa.

The issue of American music dominating African airwaves is of course not unique to South Africa. In recent years similar protests have erupted in other African countries such as Kenya and Gambia. Previously even Kenyan band Elani recently came out to accuse the Music Copyright Society of Kenya (MCSK) of grossly underpaying airplay royalties to artists.

Zola highlighted that South Africans now; suddenly get shocked when they read on tabloids about Brown Dash dying without having money. Mandoza losing his 7.5 million house, another example maybe Zola’s house (himself,) got auctioned.

Zola further clarified that when as a country choose to limit our own creativity and sabotage home groomed productions and refuse to give them the deserved spotlight, especially on television and radio then we deplete the income most of the artists depend on, hence numerous artist tend to end up poor.

Watch the full clip below: