20th August 2020
Own Correspondent
The Minister for Presidential Affairs, Governance and Public Administration, Kabo Morwaeng told parliament today that national symbol of pride Botswana Television(BTV) currently gives 91% of airtime to local content while the rest is for the consumption of foreign content.
“The target percentage of local content versus foreign content is 60%/40% in favour of local content. But as I have already indicated the station coverage for local content is currently much higher of the target and that is 91%,” said Kabo Morwaeng, Minister for Presidential affairs, Governance and Public Administration.
He said, “There will be always be a bias towards more local content than foreign. Some of the foreign content that is aired on BTV is free whole some while dome is bought cheaply.
According to government officials employs various strategies are employed to ensure local content is taken up by the market like commissioning new programmes where station provides 100% funding of productions, sponsor driven content, partnering with BTV to augment production resources such as studios, cameras and edit suites and unsolicited content with BTV purchasing some items of the book shelves to ensure they fit needs of station due to relevance, unique nature and cost effectiveness.
Morwaeng, said BTV programmes spent P43,084,745.71 on local content and P10,527,427.00 on foreign content. A further P107,038.34 was spent on live broadcasts of election petitions.
