I was angry, though hardly surprised, to read the contrived and heavily biased “survey” released by the owners of Hot 102.7 FM to justify their latest attempt to stick the knife into classical music — and what remains of Gauteng’s cultural heart — for good.
When I worked at Classic FM through its business rescue and eventual acquisition by the Professional Consortium (backed by businessperson Dirck Ackerman) in 2021, it was already clear that the only asset that Hot MD and co-founder Lloyd Madurai truly coveted was the commercial broadcast licence. It was the missing Lego brick in his plan to position Hot as a challenger to Primedia’s 94.7 FM. And fair play to Madurai and his team: they doubled listenership between 2023 and 2025, from 316,000 to more than 613,000 weekly listeners.
But to say they played fast and loose with Classic FM’s staff would be generous. During the rescue process the impression was carefully created that Classic FM and classical music would retain a home on the community frequency at 91.9 FM while Hot shifted to the commercial licence. That never materialised. Whether because the Independent Communications Authority of SA (Icasa) insisted that Classic FM’s licence conditions prevented the switch, or because the consortium never really intended to honour the spirit of that proposal, the effect was the same, as classical music was sidelined while “Star” became a feeder nursery for Hot’s youth talent pipeline.
What did survive, and only because it was legally unavoidable, was the statutory obligation carried forward from Classic FM’s licence conditions requiring a minimum 50% classical music format on Hot 102.7. Icasa imposed those conditions to safeguard a fragile cultural ecosystem from being erased by pure market logic. Without those “pesky bureaucrats”, as I’m sure some in the consortium muttered, classical music would already have been excised entirely.
Instead, listeners have been subjected to the anaemic, post-7pm cultural tokenism that passes for classical programming, such as Carolyn Steyn’s lobotomised background-music version of a centuries-old art form that deserves better than to be spooned out like chamomile tea.
And now, once again, the station is attacking the last vestiges of Gauteng’s musical soul. The youth orchestras, Buskaid, the choirs, the conductors, the listeners … all collateral damage in a commercial land grab.
This is where the legal context matters, because Icasa’s mandate is not merely administrative. Section 2(s) of the Electronic Communications Act requires Icasa to ensure “a diverse range of broadcasting services catering for all language and cultural groups”. Section 2(a)–(c) of the Broadcasting Act goes further, compelling the regulator to maintain a broadcasting system that is “balanced, diverse and meeting the needs of all South Africans”.
And section 2 of the regulator’s founding statute, the Icasa Act, instructs the authority to regulate broadcasting in the public interest, guided by the principles of freedom of expression, cultural participation and equitable access. In other words, broadcast licences are not private property. They are public assets entrusted to broadcasters on condition that they serve the full breadth of South Africa’s cultural life and not merely the most profitable sliver of it.
Classical music is not a luxury format. It is part of the constitutional guarantee of cultural expression and diversity. The question is not whether Hot 102.7 can “prove” through a self-serving survey that classical music is unpopular, inconvenient or commercially inefficient. The real question is whether Icasa will allow a commercial station — one entrusted with a licence born of a quite different mandate — to dismantle yet another of the dwindling cultural spaces this country still possesses.
If the regulator allows a niche but constitutionally protected genre such as classical music to be erased from the airwaves, it won’t end there. Jazz will be next. Choral traditions. Indigenous music. Anything that does not deliver the quarterly revenue growth targets of a venture-funded radio operation.
South Africa’s public airwaves were never meant to be a free-for-all for the highest bidder, and unless Icasa remembers its constitutional duty to protect the whole of South Africa’s musical heritage, not just the commercially dominant flavours, we may soon have a province with billboards, breakfast shows and bumper stickers, but no cultural heartbeat at all.
Private credit’s cockroach moment
The market is starting to raise the alarm over the private-credit boom. For more than a decade, global regulators congratulated themselves for squeezing risk out of banks through successive Basel reforms. But what they actually did was force it into the shadows. And as anyone who has switched on a kitchen light at midnight knows, where there is one cockroach, there are usually many more skittering in the dark.
The defaults of US private credit lenders First Brands and Tricolor should have been treated as early warning flares. Instead, private credit evangelists insist these are isolated “bad apples”. The banks mutter that the whole orchard is rotten. Someone is wrong.
Private credit has certainly plugged the gap left by overregulated banks. But the speed and scale of its growth into a multitrillion-dollar lightly supervised sector, built on marks that can swing from par to zero in a month, is beginning to expose structural cracks. The “Bond King”, Jeff Gundlach, calls it “the Wild West”. Jamie Dimon sees “cockroaches”. Interconnections with regional US banks deepen by the quarter. Data from S&P Global shows that bank lending to non-bank lenders has quadrupled in a decade, so contagion channels are already built.
South African pension funds, insurers and multimanagers have piled into offshore private-credit allocations in search of yield, often through global managers whose portfolios include exactly these murky, middle-market deals that are now wobbling. Local banks, already squeezed by Basel III and the coming Basel IV capital stack, are following the same pattern: lending less to mid-cap corporates and more to non-bank lenders.
If the first US cockroaches are now in view, South African savers and trustees must assume the same rule applies here. And as history keeps reminding us, it’s never the risk you can see that gets you. It’s what’s breeding in the dark.
• Avery, a financial journalist and broadcaster, produces BDTV’s ‘Business Watch’.
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