State and Public Media in Southern Africa: The Government Still Holds the Microphone

Across Southern Africa, the institutions that the state owns and the climate in which journalism actually operates tell two different stories. The region contains some of the most open media environments on the African continent (South Africa and Namibia rank first and second in Africa in the 2026 World Press Freedom Index, at 21st and 23rd globally and among the highest-ranked countries worldwide) yet the state media outlets within these same countries remain overwhelmingly state-controlled or state-captured. The result is a striking gap between a near-uniform state-controlled core and the comparatively free societies that surround it.

Of the ten state and public media outlets that the State Media Monitor tracks across Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia and South Africa, eight are classified State-Controlled (SC) and two as Captured Public/State-Managed (CaPu). None reaches the independent end of the spectrum. The pattern is most uniform in the three smaller states, where every tracked outlet is state-controlled, and breaks only in South Africa, whose larger and more contested media economy has produced a more mixed picture.

The dominant model across the subregion is the most direct form of state ownership: broadcasters, news agencies and state publishers run as government departments or state entities, without independent governing boards, statutory guarantees of editorial independence, or external oversight mechanisms designed to insulate them from the executive.

In Botswana, both tracked outlets are classified State-Controlled. The Department of Broadcasting Services operates Botswana Television and Radio Botswana directly within government, while the Department of Information, through the Botswana Press Agency (BOPA), established in 1981, publishes the free government Daily News and the magazine Kutlwano, with BOPA providing government news content across the state information system. Neither operates through an autonomous public-service board.

In Lesotho, the same structure prevails. The Lesotho National Broadcasting Service runs Lesotho Television, Radio Lesotho and Ultimate Radio as a department within the ministry responsible for communications, and the Lesotho News Agency (LENA) operates the national newswire under the ministry’s information function. Both are classified State-Controlled, and State Media Monitor review records LENA as reliant on a flat annual government subsidy with only marginal independent revenue. The country has no daily newspaper, and survey evidence has pointed to declining public perceptions of media freedom.

In Namibia, all three tracked outlets, the Namibian Broadcasting Corporation (NBC), the New Era Publications Corporation (NEPC) and the Namibia Press Agency (NAMPA), are classified State-Controlled. A proposed consolidation of NEPC and NAMPA, discussed since the early 2020s and publicly advanced again in 2024, was the subject of parliamentary scrutiny in April 2025, an indication that the structure of the state-media sector remains under active official review.

South Africa is the structural exception. Of its three tracked outlets, the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) and Independent Media, the private newspaper group controlled through Sekunjalo/Survé-linked interests, are classified Captured Public/State-Managed, while the Government Communication and Information System (GCIS), the state’s central communications arm, is classified State-Controlled. The presence of two CaPu outlets rather than purely state-controlled ones reflects the SABC’s formal public-service mandate and Independent Media’s private ownership, both captured in practice rather than operated as direct government organs.

What makes Southern Africa distinctive is that this uniformly controlled state-media core sits inside some of the continent’s freest overall media environments. In the 2026 RSF Index, South Africa ranks 21st of 180 countries and Namibia 23rd, the two highest-placed countries in Africa, both in RSF’s “satisfactory” band.

The divergence, in other words, is between structure and environment. The way these states own and run their own media has not tracked the broader trajectory of press freedom in their societies: open, competitive private-media sectors and constitutional protections coexist with state broadcasters, news agencies and state publishers that remain directly embedded in government or structurally vulnerable to political and state-linked capture. The freedom that journalists in Namibia or South Africa enjoy is a feature of the wider ecosystem and the private press, not of the governance of the state outlets themselves.

The persistence of the state-controlled model in the smaller states (government-department broadcasters and ministry-run news agencies, without boards or editorial charters) suggests that reform of state media has lagged behind the broader liberalisation of these media markets. Where change is being discussed, it is incremental: the proposed NEPC–NAMPA consolidation in Namibia is an organisational rationalisation rather than an independence reform, and in South Africa long-running debates over the SABC’s funding model and governance continue without having lifted it into the independent public tier.