The high prophets of commercialisation lost the struggle for the soul of the SABC this week, reports Mark Gevisser
TWO men were notably absent from the panel of five SABC big shots going face-to-face with the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) yesterday as the corporation unveiled its plans for transformation: Quentin Green and Steve Schubach.
Green, head of SABC television until last week, was forced to resign after a confrontation with chief executive Zwelakhe Sisulu over his proposed TV schedules and over allegations that he was undermining the transformation process. Schubach is in charge of the corporation’s finances — but has been left out, entirely, from the costings that form the basis of the SABC’s proposals to the IBA. These two were the high prophets of the commercialisation of the SABC; their absence was a striking indicator of the battles lost and won in the struggle for the soul of the SABC that has been waged at Auckland Park over the past six months.
Despite much talk of “downsizing”, yesterday’s proposals were generally about the reorganisation — rather than the stripping — of the monolith. SABC wants, for example, to keep all three of its TV channels. The only difference is that public broadcasting and commercial functions will be integrated, and the purely commercial channel will use NNTV’s transmitter network rather than TV1’s — and will therefore be the smallest of the three.
There were some radical initiatives, like the proposal to shed signal distribution company Sentech and the decision, operative immediately, to retrench 800 people and cut administrative expenses by 10 percent.
The business-unit system — set up by Green and Schubach under previous CE Wynand Harmse — will be retained but rationalised from five to three units, with much more emphasis being placed on production than administration. Currently, 36 percent of the SABC’s staff is administrative; according to the SABC’s proposals, this should be brought down to 15 percent.
All this restructuring will raise an immediate R100-million but will, according to the SABC’s proposals, have to be supplemented by a state subsidy of least R380-million a year if the corporation is to cut its advertising budget from 75 percent to 55 percent of total revenue while at the same time realising its ambitious plans.
These include a significant increase in local content (from 41 percent to 60 percent); a 100 percent increase in youth drama and a 40 percent increase in adult drama; the establishment of 11 unilingual national radio stations; the expansion of Television News Productions to provide extensive regional coverage; and the use of all 11 official languages in locally made drama and current affairs programming.
Yet, just over a month ago, Sisulu told the IBA that the SABC was not even factoring possible state funding in to its calculations. What has changed?
“We know that it’s cloud-cuckoo-land to expect anywhere near R400-million from government,” noted one senior SABC source. “But we need to make the point that money is the means to the end of public broadcasting. We make money to broadcast. We do not broadcast to make money.”
This credo is repeated throughout the SABC’s submission to the IBA, which begins with the following statement: “Central to the SABC’s argument is that it exists to deliver public benefit and not to pursue commercial profit as an end in itself. Funding is a means to the end. The corporation would willingly reduce or abandon its claims on a share of available advertising revenue if it could secure public funding sufficient to meet its broadcasting objectives.”
Such sentiments are in contradiction to the ideas of Green and Schubach. They came to the SABC as outsiders: they were marketers interested in commerce, rather than social engineers interested in thought control. And they were English speakers in an Afrikaans stronghold. Together, under Harmse, they transformed the SABC from a floundering broeder pit of Afrikaner nationalism into what appeared to be a profitable institution.
But yesterday’s proposals were drafted by a fascinating new coalition of powers at the SABC. Principal players were head of strategic planning David Niddrie and Australian consultant Geoff Heriot. Both are firm advocates of a large SABC that integrates — rather than splits — its commercial and public broadcasting functions.
The third significant player was Gert Claasen, an old- guarder who benefited from the SABC business-unit system (he ran an empire called Broadcast Centre that was dismantled this week) and who has now effectively replaced Green as TV chief, even though former CCV head Madala Mphahlele is nominally in charge.
Assisting them with the number-crunching was not Schubach, but Pierre van der Hoven, the young and unknown chief accountant from Safritel, the SABC’s inhouse production company. It was Van der Hoven, not Schubach, who answered questions about the SABC’s financial future.
Van der Hoven is being praised, in some quarters, as the corporation’s “unsung hero”: it was he who found the inconsistencies in Green’s schedules that led to his demise.
“It appeared,” said one senior source, “that Green was attempting to lock the SABC into long-term financial commitments that were not sustainable.” This, another added, had “deliberately inflated the costs of public broadcasting so as to indicate the folly of continuing with public broadcasting in a commercial environment.”
Green declined to comment, saying only: “I did the work to the best of my ability and I am quite comfortable with what I did.” An article in Rapport newspaper last weekend stated, however, that Green believed the Transformation Unit, under Niddrie, was “white-anting” his division and that he was not prepared to work in such an environment any longer. Whatever lay behind his resignation, one thing is certain: Green’s departure was the culmination of months of tension between himself and Sisulu’s appointees.
Also involved in the process of preparing the SABC’s proposals were old-guarders who predate Green and Schubach; former apparatchiks who once ran SABC for the National Party: Hennie Human and Cor Nortje of Safritel.
Human, formerly head of television, was at the centre of an alleged fraud scandal involving a propoganda film about the Angolan conflict, and was forced to leave the SABC for a period. As head of Safritel, which was denied much work under Green in favour of outside production houses, Human is now behind the SABC’s controversial proposals to increase inhouse productions and do away substantially with external commissions to independent broadcasters.
All these people have two things in common: a violent antipathy for Green and a belief (however skewed in the latter instances) in public broadcasting. A senior SABC manager put it bluntly: “The real old-guarders, like Human, are on board much more than people like Green were. They might have a tainted history, but they do believe in public broadcasting being an agent for social change, rather than just a way of delivering audiences to products.”