The Auckland Park top brass are quick to impute sinister motives when anyone suggests that the SABC behaves like a state broadcaster rather than the independent public service institution it is supposed to have become.
But they keep on giving us good reasons to do just that.
First, they lost the right to broadcast local club football, largely because they acted as if they were inherently entitled to it, rather than required to compete in the marketplace.
The SABC is a public broadcaster, but one which relies on advertising and sponsorship revenue. Because of this it is duty-bound to pitch for soccer rights in open procedures.
In losing the rights in the manner it did, the SABC arguably breached its public broadcasting mandate. The board should put in place an investigation into the acquisition of sports rights by the broadcaster and see what it paid for events like the A1 Grand Prix and the Winter Olympics.
Football fans, too, protested that by letting the contract fall into the hands of pay-channel SuperSport, this most working class of all national pastimes has been mortgaged to the interests of the emerging black middle classes. Fans who already struggle to pay the R20 gate cannot be expected to pay even the R200-a-month subscription fee for the minimum access to digital television.
Another report this week suggests that the SuperSport deal is structured so that fans who watch free-to-air channels might, in fact, get to see more games than before.
But wait, there’s more. Now that the rights have been sold to SuperSport, the top dogs at the corporation are lashing out at their own editorial staff over the affair. The SABC has suspended sports broadcaster Robert Marawa for the journalistic outrage of asking the pay channel — a key player in the biggest news event of the week — to comment on it.
Marawa works for Metro FM, an SABC radio station, and does television work for SuperSport. Apparently his downtown bosses didn’t like the fact that he gave airtime to his Randburg bosses.
But, believe it or not, the worst is yet to come. The SABC was so busy throwing its toys that it then lost the free-to-air rights to the season-opening Telkom charity cup. It couldn’t claim that the public was being denied access to football by the evil machinations of private capital, so it simply banned its newsroom staff from attending the tournament’s media launch.
That decision is very much of a piece with the conduct of Snuki Zikalala, the corporation’s director of news, in blacklisting outside commentators whose views he personally dislikes. What comes first is not the public’s right to know, but the personal whims and ideological preferences of the SABC’s hierarchs.
The incident highlights the dangers of combining, in the single person of Dali Mpofu, the post of CEO and editor-in-chief — particularly as he is not a journalist and knows little about what makes news. But it also exposes the doublethink that prevails at the SABC.
Mpofu et al have been complaining for months that selling the rights to SuperSport would deprive millions who rely on the public broadcaster for the ability to follow the fortunes of their favourite teams. Yet when it came to denying the public not only a full spectrum of comment on a crucial issue, but even the news itself, the SABC showed no hesitation. The small matter of the public broadcaster being answerable to its public and not the bruised egos of those on the top floor did not even enter the equation.
Blacklisting individuals is bad enough. But blacklisting news events and suspending journalists is even worse.
Beware Blatter blather
Fifa supremo Sepp Blatter was in town this week on a whirlwind tour of our 2010 soccer preparations and on a damage-control mission.
In April he told the BBC that there was a plan B if South Africa did not make its deadlines. Fifa spin doctors said he meant that every planned World Cup had a back-up plan in case of national catastrophe. But, with Afro-pessimistic chips on their shoulders, the global media read him to mean that he thought South Africa would mess up.
In South Africa this week he assured the football-loving republic that these sentiments came from “people who are jealous” of the country and the continent’s historic hosting of the football showcase. “South Africa’s organisation is very good and this explains all this criticism.”
Only God, said Blatter, would prevent the showcase from coming to South Africa. He even prayed for us, the first African host since the World Cup kicked off in 1930.
There is a lesson in all this. We should not wait for Blatter’s okay. As a nation we need to put our energy into making the World Cup work for as many people as possible. And we need to be our own inspectors.
Remember that Blatter is the same man who in Australia moaned with the Aussies about the poor refereeing standards at the last World Cup. “I would like to apologise to our fans in Australia. The [Australian team] should have gone into the quarter-finals in place of Italy.” When the Italian media threatened to lynch him, he changed tack and paid tribute to them: “Italy proved that superior skills, teamwork and individual determination are the ingredients that lead to World Cup glory.”
No doubt Blatter has batted to get the World Cup to Africa, but let’s not mark milestones by his statements. The ball is literally in our fields.