RTA’s director:
Najib Roshan (2007 resignation)
Zarin Anzor Mohammad Zarin Anzoor (20100827, 20110930, )
Dr. Moheb Spinghar (June 2013)

Deputy Director General at RTA:
Jalal Mahmoodi (20121214)

RTA’s director of planning and international relations:
Abdul Rahman Panjshiri (20160505)

Currently, state owned Radio Television Afghanistan (RTA) has approximately 2,000 staff on its tashkil (the formal staffing spread-sheet). Of this number, 1,050 are in Kabul and the remaining 950 in the provinces. All RTA staff are government employees, and most of them are over the age 35, which makes RTA less competitive on the market, where most privately-owned TVs are run by young professionals who speak to an equally youthful population. (62 per cent of Afghanistan’s population is between the age of 20 and 40, and 75 per cent of the population is under 35 years of age.) According to the people interviewed for the 2012 BBC Media Action Policy Briefing on Afghan media in transition, “RTA has only one shortcoming: it has less young people… If they hire young people as anchors or newscasters, it would attract a younger audience.” However, there is also a beauty in preserving institutional memory with the ‘old-timers’, as captured by this 2002 BBC feature story on a RTA staff member in charge of the pre-computer age tape archive of Afghan radio.
 

RTA’s operational budget for 1395 (2016/17) is 404 million Afghani, approximately 5.9 million US dollars; the development budget for the same year is around 2.4 million US Dollars. (Afghanistan operates with this kind of split budgeting). This is a rise compared to the previous year, when operational costs of 343 million Afghani (5 million USD) and developmental expenditures of 1.6 million US dollars were allocated to it. At the same time, RTA generates revenue from advertising and other sources that amount to approximately 220 million Afghani (3.2 million USD). This shows that RTA is far from being self-sufficient. However, RTA, although an independent directorate, does not manage its advertising revenue directly; this is handled by the Ministry of Finance.
 

The proportion allocated for personnel expenses is over 60 per cent of the operational budget (five years average 2008-13), both in its TV and radio sections. As in many other Afghan institutions, this accounts for its largest expenditure – meaning fewer resources for modernisation. Program production costs, for example, account for only 1.3 per cent, while the budget for producing original content is almost zero, as shown by the Japanese development agency, JICA, in December 2013.
 

However, according to Abdul Rahman Panjshiri, RTA’s director of planning and international relations, the crux of RTA’s problem is not the availability of financial resources, but the management structures of the state-owned broadcaster. “The money we receive from the government is sufficient, but our management is weak,” Panjshiri said.

Two confidential documents both deal with the future of RTA. The first document is a 2015 confidential feasibility study on the reform of the institution, which was carried out on the president’s request and authored by David Page, a well-known media expert and a former BBC world service staffer. The second document is a lengthy proposal on RTA’s transformation to a public service broadcaster (PSB) developed by the institution’s own Director-General, Zarin Anzor (a well-known writer, Pashtun scholar and journalist), and submitted to the president several months ago. The second document was a direct result of recommendations made in the confidential feasibility study.

RTA planning director Panjshiri said that President Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai met with RTA’s management and asked them to prepare a detailed report and plan for transformation. The RTA’s management probed the president’s resolve regarding the introduction of a licence fee paid by TV viewers. The president, however, advised RTA’s management to first improve its programme quality and increase its reach to its audience, and then “to start thinking about the licence fee.” Following this meeting, RTA organised a committee, which included representatives from UNESCO, the BBC and the Afghan media organisation Nai, which works locally on the empowerment of independent media outlets and organisations.
 

Anzor’s proposal, which includes a strategic plan of transformation, a draft PSB law, a proposal for RTA’s reform and three programme documents for 2015/16, is a light take on the reform and does not make significant changes to RTA’s governing structures. For example, according to the draft law the candidate for the post of Director General will still be proposed and appointed by the president, not through public bidding (locally called kankur) and approved by an independent commission (to be formed), as is the case in many other countries. According to international PSB standards, the most important way of securing the independence of the governing board is through appointments of its management governing bodies through a multi-party body, not by an individual minister.

The proposal covers the period from 1 January 2016 to 31 December 2019 and will cost 13.5 million US dollars for the first three years. (The budget for 2019 is not included in the document AAN received.) On a technical level, the proposal includes changes such as a conversion from analogue to digital transmission, the establishment of four TV channels (global and national, entertainment and news) with 33 studios, ie one in all provinces, a correspondent network in Pakistan, India, Russia, Iran, the EU and the US and the incorporation of the Wolesi Jirga channel, currently managed by parliament itself. It also proposes the recruitment of 300 new employees during its structural reform, but omits to mention what would happen to current staff. Additionally, 40 new radio and 15 new TV programmes (including talk shows and entertainment programmes) are to be produced during this period.

The transformation proposal for RTA also suggests an annual licence fee of 100 Afghani (1.5 US dollars), which would be collected from customers along with electricity bills by the state-owned Afghanistan Electricity Company, better known as Breshna. (4) According to the proposal, this would result in annual revenue of 400 million Afghani (5.8 million US dollars). Additional resources would be collected through advertising, on average 200 million Afghani (3 million US dollars) per year.
 

This all sounds attractive, but it remains technical to a large extent, avoiding changes in the management and the very character of the institution. “A PSB is a system of principles, you can not accept some and reject others,” Panjshiri told AAN, adding, “Anzor’s proposal did not capture the essence of the PSB. It is like a mouth without the teeth.”