Modeled after South Africa's struggling public broadcaster, the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), Swaziland's languishing broadcasting bill hopes to restructure the tiny Southern African nation's likewise struggling state broadcasting offering into a more cohesive service unit.
If passed into law, it will create the Swaziland Broadcasting Corporation (SBC) and amalgamate the operations, services and resources of to Swaziland state broadcasting services into one national public broadcasting service.
Swaziland currently has the state-run and heavily censored Radio Swaziland, and the state-run Swazi TV channel that is also rife with government censorship and that is being run by the struggling Swaziland Television Authority.
With small and dwindling audiences, Swaziland's government has done very little to remain relevant in the public broadcasting space as Swazi viewers are switching on to other television services.
More and more Swazi citizens are getting their television from pay-TV services like MultiChoice's DStv offered by MultiChoice Swaziland.
The Chinese StarTimes Media is in a big push to roll out its pay-TV service in Swaziland, as is the new Econet Media with its Kwesé TV.
There's also been a surge of Swazi's buying once-off South African activated free-to-air OpenView HD (OVHD) satellite TV decoders that's available in South Africa but taken across the border where it's resold in Swaziland in black market trade.
So far Swaziland's minister of information, communication and technology (ICT), Dumisani Christopher Ndlangamandla, has failed to table the bill in Swaziland's parliament, a year after the first draft was submitted to parliament.
Dumisani Christopher Ndlangamandla, already promised the creation and establishment of the Swaziland Broadcasting Corporation by the end of 2015 - a deadline that came and went.
