Persistent interference by the SABC’s politically mandated board in decisions ranging from programming to branding and technology purchases is threatening the broadcaster’s hard-won financial stability, according to current and former executives.
Channel bosses are under intense pressure to run more current affairs and African content during prime time. Current SABC interpretation of news and African content is to mirror a government agenda. And SABC1’s successful rebranding strategy Ya Mampela (the real thing) is under threat because some on the board believe it glamourises the wrong aspects of black youth culture.
With advertising revenues dependent on programming that delivers audiences, such changes will have serious financial consequences, a number of sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, warned this week, saying strategies that former CEO Peter Matlare put in place to ensure corporation viability are being undermined.
Matlare resigned last week after repeated, and increasingly public, differences with the board, which is closely aligned with the Department of Communications and chaired by Eddie Funde, an influential African National Congress official.
Insiders at the SABC and in the ruling party say major new government funding will be required to keep the corporation afloat if it continues on the path the board is mapping.
An ANC official who helps formulate communications policy told the Mail & Guardian: ”We are not going to be able to achieve what we want unless we change the funding model.”
The feeling in the party, he said, is that the corporation needs more fully to ”participate in the national development project”.
Coming just four months after the SABC announced it had turned the corner financially and was narrowly in profit, those comments appear to bear out the remarks of sources who believe that the board is on a collision course with commercial reality.
”The new board knows nothing about broadcasting, but that doesn’t stop them from interfering with programming,” one former executive argued. ”You can’t see the results now, but in 18 months it’s going to be bad.”
Managers still at the SABC and independent producers say it is not just the Great South Africans programme that has been yanked from the schedule: the board has cancelled other programmes that have been commissioned or completed.
”The current executive came in with a clear mandate to take an SABC in operational crisis — a cumbersome, overstaffed, sick parastatal, with a demoralised sales team — and to turn it around,” said one manager. ”The implicit assumption was that they had to prioritise commercial success over the public mandate.
”It’s a tight balancing act to extract as much revenue as possible while doing as much as you can on the mandate — especially language representation. With the channels on the edge of break-even, pushing for changes in the schedule will have serious knock-on effects.”
After losing R148-million in 2003, the corporation reported R3,4-million in profit last year as improving revenues and internal reorganisation began to pay off. But this financial position is precarious.
The corporation is in urgent need of recapitalisation, managers say, with much of its equipment and network creaking and outdated after two decades of under-investment. An estimated R1,2-billion is needed to ward off a serious technical crisis. The corporation is lobbying the government, so far unsuccesfully, to step in.
In the interim, elements of the recapitalisation are being funded from free cash flow, but sources familiar with recent financial modelling done at the SABC say the stress this will exert on finances over the next five years could tip the broadcaster back into the crisis it experienced in 1996/97, when the National Treasury had to stump up more than R600-million to plug a hole in its balance sheet.
A plan to save R300-million by cutting 10% of the workforce has been put on ice, compounding the problem.
Just what a new funding model could look like is disputed. The Department of Communications did not respond to requests for comment, but people familiar with the debate said it revolves around whether to sell off the commercial channels to fund recapitalisation, and how to structure state funding.
SABC spokesperson Paul Setsetse insists that while the new board may bring a difference of emphasis, it is not fundamentally at variance with it predecessor: ”I don’t think there is any conflict between what the board sees as its mandate, and what others say is interference. This board is equally geared to increasing revenue for the SABC to continue to meet its public mandate.”