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Cape Town - A Cape Town pastor whose Christmas sermon on SAfm was edited to remove a poem about Jacob Zuma’s rape accuser Fezekile Kuzwayo had “gone outside his brief,” the SABC said on Sunday.
Methodist Reverend Alan Storey had earlier levelled allegations of censorship against the SABC after a Christmas Day sermon, which was pre-recorded, was clipped to remove his reading of the poem “I am Kanga”.
The poem centres on Fezekile Kuzwayo, the woman who had accused President Jacob Zuma of rape.
Zuma was acquitted of the charges in 2008 and Kuzwayo fled the country. She returned without fanfare and died in KwaZulu-Natal in 2016.
On the allegations of censorship, Storey said that his sermon, which contained the poem, had been recorded on December 11.
He said that he was later contacted by SAfm producers who said that they would be editing his sermon to remove the poem.
SABC spokesperson Kaizer Kganyago said that it was “easy to cry censorship”.
“In this particular instance, there is nothing untoward. SAfm had approached him to give a sermon and we gave him a brief. He was asked to deliver a Christmas message. In this case he went outside the brief; he made the message political and we had the right to edit it,” he said.
“It doesn’t matter who it is about, if he didn’t want to stick to the brief he should not have done it. Being courteous they went back to him and told him what they were doing. This is not censorship. We requested him to do something and he didn’t do it."
He said that if Storey had been doing a sermon privately and the SABC recorded him and edited his message it would be a different matter.
