The seemingly impregnable infrastructure of the SABC is under attack — and it’s crumbling. Mark Gevisser reports on changes at Auckland Park
AN SABC journalist, bleary-eyed from one too many late- night meetings of her transformation committee, looks up from the stack of organograms scattered around her: “Yes,” she says wearily, “things are changing here. In the old days, if you challenged your manager you were hauled before a disciplinary committee and demoted. Now, if you challenge your manager, you’re drafted on to a working committee.”
Transformation-fever has hit the SABC, and these are its symptoms: organograms, workshops and blitz of interactive posters, sullying the previously unassailable infrastructure of Auckland Park, bearing legends like “The Transformer is here. It will break down the walls of “, on which staffers are invited to scrawl their own wish-lists.
Another poster reads: “Things are going to change around here. What should change?” Underneath is a blank cartoon bubble. On one of these posters, an exasperated staffer has written: “We should stop changing and start working.”
It’s appropriate that such caution has been penned outside the lifts on the 18th floor, for here is to be found the nerve-centre of transformation. If new chief executive Zwelakhe Sisulu is the messiah of change up on the 21st floor, then his two primary disciples, David Niddrie and Christo Pretorius, are to be found beavering away three floors below; the New Blood and the Old Guard bound inextricably by the mantras of transformation, “a programme-driven SABC” and “consultative management”.
Niddrie, a bluff chain-smoker, is visibly uncomfortable in the starched collars of management but utterly at home with the tactical manipulations that will be required of him as transformation-unit co-ordinator. A policy buff, he is earmarked for the permanent post of general manager of strategic planning. Pretorius, the corporation’s affable and butter-smooth industrial relations chief, takes the credit for building up the SABC’s fractious unions and bringing them on board. Sprawling out beneath them are a plethora of transformation committees, transformation action groups and transformation workshops.
The SABC has become, at last, a talking shop. Now, when you are whisked up to the dizzy heights of senior management by one of the legion of Afrikaans secretaries, she will, quite unprompted, unleash a tirade of vitriol upon one of the bosses of the ancien regime. In the old days, the crimplene brigade kept their heads down and got on with their jobs; now, laughs one new staffer, “even the poppies are dancing”.
Sisulu is “very satisfied with the process. Apart from everything else, it has thrown up new leadership potential throughout the corporation. Once I was appointed, my first task was to reproduce myself, and through this process I have managed.”
Over at Television News Productions (TNP), the 700- strong staff has been locked in workshops for six weeks now. Andre le Roux, head of TNP’s transformation committee, estimates that each of the staff’s 92 representatives has put in an average of 85 hours’ work on the division’s transformation proposal.
At TNP alone there are 40 working groups, and all have been brought together in a series of workshops and have come up with a 55-page document to be presented to top management. “It’s a many humped, many legged, many coloured camel,” admits one drafter. Indeed, it does seem to try to be all things to all people; the classic product of consultative democracy. Among its more significant proposals is a streamlined new management structure.
But, notes Le Roux, “this should not be seen as a final proposal. It is a synthesis of the diversity of opinions that exist in TNP that will be presented to Sisulu. It is up to the group executive to take our ideas and run with them.”
Like all the members of his transformation committee, Le Roux speaks about the process with missionary zeal: “TNP is further advanced than anyone else at SABC in this process of transformation, and we are convinced this is the right way of doing it.” He warns that “the corporation will ignore staff input of this intensity and quality at its peril … the staff just won’t tolerate it drifting into the sand.”
Problem is, though, that many of Le Roux’s own staffers see it already as being hopelessly mired in the quicksand of bureaucracy and the kind of democracy-speak that often masks firm and decisive leadership. A case in point: almost no one from the current affairs department, which set the whole ball rolling by rising up against its management in late July, attends the drafting meetings.
Every time Sisulu speaks, he seems to utter the words “programme-driven”. But, notes a TNP staffer, “while I really approve of the idea of a programme-driven SABC, I fear that this has become a meaningless buzzword. We’re not working on programmes. We’re working on organograms.”
TNP has always held the dubious honour of being the locus of anarchy at SABC. Other sectors of the corporation look on with befuddled bemusement at the intensity of the transformation process over there.
Over at radio there are two transformation committees, one dealing specifically with radio news and the other with general radio transformation. Both are more contained, more controlled — and seem to have produced more solid, attainable proposals.
The former committee approved a new management structure which has put into place a new triumvirate of Barney Mtombothi (the Sowetan’s day editor) as editor-in-chief, Franz Kruger (formerly editor of the Eastern Cape News Agency) as national news and current affairs editor, and old-guarder Alwyn Kloppers as managing editor.
The latter committee has approved the blueprint of Solly Mokoetle, head of regional radio, which calls for 11 national unilingual radio stations, and has taken the strong stand that the SABC’s commercial and public broadcasting responsibilities should be separated: the SABC’s commercial stations (like 5FM and Metro) should be allowed to continue, unhampered by any public broadcasting responsibilities, to finance — and thus protect — the viability of the public broadcasting stations.
But while there has been much frenetic activity at TNP and in radio, there is one area of the SABC that seems to be immune to transformation fever: television programming. Apologists would have it that this is because of the technological and economic complexity of the area; critics would have it that this is because there is intransigence and foot-dragging at the channels, particularly by those on the commercial side who have not bought in to the notion of public broadcasting.
Sisulu has acknowledged this problem, and has instructed his transformation worker bees to set up a TV transformation committee as a matter of urgency. But the fact that there are no decisions (or even solid proposals) on the SABC’s future channel-portfolio means that all of TNP’s late-night work might well go out the window.
Says one staffer: “What happens to the channels cannot but affect the way we are structured. Once they decide that, we’re going to have to start all over again.”
A radio staffer acknowledges that there has been “a wave of creative energy unleashed, and we who believe in transformation are riding its crest. But the problem with the SABC has always been a lack of creative management. If management can’t harness this energy into meaningful change, the wave will dump us all and the silent majority will prevail.”
At which point, all eyes turn, once more to SABC’s very own Nelson Mandela, the new boss whose eyes twinkle with vision — a scarce commodity indeed in the upper reaches of the Piet Meyer Building. TNP staffers took heart, this week, at Sisulu’s rapid response to Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s tyrannical behaviour in the SABC’s Durban studios.
Sisulu might not yet have performed the alchemy of tranformation, but he has got the SABC talking. His genius was not to launch a staff-driven transformation process — it happened spontaneously in the news divisions of radio and television — but rather to systematise a series of isolated wildfire incidents into a carefully worked out and tightly managed process upon which he can put his imprimatur.