Ivor Powell
The SABC’s chief executive, the Reverend Hawu Mbatha, was axed this week as a major restructuring of the troubled corporation’s top management kicked into action.
Senior sources in the public broadcaster said that a letter amounting to a dismissal was sent this week to Mbatha under the signature of SABC board chair Dr Vincent Maphai.
The Maphai letter couches the dismissal of Mbatha in terms of the impending corporatisation of the SABC, in line with the new Broadcasting Act, saying that the new SABC will be transformed to a point where new qualities of leadership are required from top management. The new demands arise out of the proposed breaking down of the SABC into two sections – one operating as a public broadcaster and the other as a commercially driven operation – which will be united only at the level of the group executive.
The letter proposes that discussions get under way to structure a retrenchment package. Mbatha is understood to have consulted his lawyers ahead of entering into discussions on a severance package.
The letter was dispatched only days after another development which will significantly alter the face of the SABC. The Mail & Guardian can confirm former group communications chief Thaninga Shope last week joined her close associate, disgraced head of television Molefe Mokgatle, in resigning from the SABC. A month earlier the two had suffered the indignity of demotion as a result of disciplinary proceedings arising from investigations into irregularities in the SABC’s commissioning procedures.
After the disciplinary hearings, Mokgatle and Shope, formerly widely regarded as the two most powerful figures in the Byzantine politics of the SABC, were given the status of middle managers.
The effective dismissal of Mbatha comes after three recent reports by outside management consultants, in all of which the management of the SABC and its group executive have been blamed for the corporation’s woes.
One of these, compiled by the consultancy Africa Now after a “team- building exercise” in Fancourt, southern Cape, late last year, lists Mbatha’s leadership as one of the major stumbling blocks to efficiency and dynamism in the corporation.
The Fancourt report, which was compiled on the basis of individual and group interviews with the 11-member group executive, blames the ongoing crisis in the SABC on a “lack of competent, strong, visionary, unifying and inspirational leadership that prevailed prior to, during and after the Zwelakhe Sisulu regime”.
Mbatha was also criticised in last year’s KPMG report into irregularities in commissioning procedures in the corporation for failing to exercise control over the buying and commissioning of programming.
This allowed senior members of the group executive, notably Mokgatle and Shope, to commission programming without following proper procedures.
As the M&G revealed last month, the laxity of control led to the bizarre accumulation of more than R350-million in unused television stock – programming commissioned or paid for but never shown on air.
In the third of the documents, the first part of a restructuring report currently being compiled by the Gemini Consultancy, the analysts argue that the entire group executive needs to be removed if the corporation is to be effectively streamlined and repositioned.
Sources inside the SABC board said the planned removal of Mbatha constituted the beginning of a clean-out of appointments made by Sisulu, now with the New Africa Investments Limited consortium.
Mbatha, who cut his broadcasting teeth with Radio Zulu in the apartheid years, was a surprise appointment to lead the SABC in July 1998. He was widely dismissed as a figurehead who would allow others to make the real decisions behind the scenes.
As reported earlier in the M&G, the Gemini consultants, together with the SABC’s transformation unit, have compiled a new top management organogram which will reduce the number of positions in the group executive to seven – from the present 11.
While four of these positions will be created with new job definitions – thus preventing any carry-over from the old group executive – the three top positions (those of chief executive, chief operating officer and chief financial officer) will also be redefined, by a sleight of bureaucratic hand, as executive directorships of the SABC board, rather than as posts within the corporation.
In terms of the legalistic logic of the exercise, this will allow the SABC board to make fresh appointments to the three key positions, since they are cast as new jobs. There are no indications of who is being considered for the new positions.
However, the M&G understands that board chair Maphai will step into the chief executive position in an acting capacity after the expected departure of Mbatha – to oversee the appointment of a new chief executive officer to take the corporation into a new era. Sources said that the board plans to have a new top leadership structure in place by October this year.
This will also entail the filling of two other posts; those of chief operating officer and chief financial officer. While the chief financial officer position is currently vacant, sources said that plans are also being framed for replacing the current chief operating officer, Neil Harvey – though no formal communication has yet been made. Harvey is on secondment from the Anglo American Corporation at a salary of R1,5-million a year. Sources said the terms of Harvey’s contract were being closely scrutinised as well as its expiry dates before more formal approaches were made.
It is highly unlikely, sources said, that serving members of the SABC’s group executive will be considered for either position.
The M&G understands that one of the issues up for discussion with Mbatha’s lawyers is the controversial extension of his contract in the dying days of the former SABC board – before the appointment of Maphai – for five years.
However the new board has challenged the legality and the force of the extension of contract. One board member told the M&G that the extension of the contract is not backed up by official board documentation, as would be necessary for it to be binding on the corporation.
Though contacted through his office for comment, Maphai had not responded by the time of going to press.
SABC acting head of corporate affairs Tango Lamani said he had not been briefed on any communications from the board to the executive.
He said: “To comment at this point would be pure speculation.”