"The National Community Radio Forum (NCRF), an umbrella body for 110 community radio stations in the South Africa and accounting for close to eight-million in listenership, is taken aback by deliberate and coordinated, consistent side-lining and looking down at our member radio stations by the organisers of the so-called MTN Radio Awards.

The organisers of these MTN Radio Awards have a negative and bad track record of [being] extremely hostile towards community radio stations. These awards are dominated by mainstream radio stations. For the last three years of their existence, they have been biased in terms of their categories, which openly left community radio stations in the cold. Only last year they decided to put [in] community radio stations categories after a hard-fought battle.

This year once more, they have decided to ignore NCRF and go it alone without even speaking to NCRF. We have raised this attitude with [the] MTN representative and were promised this matter will be addressed. We are surprised that the matter still continues unabated. The National Community Radio Forum is very worried about the negative attitude displayed by the organisers of this event and the bad publicity this is giving to MTN as the main sponsors of these un-progressive and untransformed so-called radio awards. How do you call these awards 'radio awards' when they leave community radio stations out?

We challenge the organisers to publicly declare the percentage of community radio stations that entered for these awards this year out of 110 community radio stations throughout the country. We are not going to be convinced by a few window-dressing stations they have entered in the name of community radio stations.

We are also challenging MTN to show their subscribers (communities) in various parts of this country and villages where they are getting the most support for their products and service the value their sponsorship is giving them.

The nation should know that we are not recognising these so-called radio awards, which [don't] include a very important section of the sector, community radio stations. These awards need to be transformed and be forced to accept the demographics of this country and break down this 'boys club'.

We call on MTN to reconsider their Service Level Agreement and make sure that community radio stations became a non-negotiable section of the agreement. A million-dollar question to MTN is, 'Do you continue with something that doesn’t give back to your magnitude of clients out there?'"