Eight ministers and deputy ministers have met the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) board to discuss the credibility and accuracy of the broadcaster’s news reports as well as its plans for covering the forthcoming elections.
This emerged from a written reply to a parliamentary question given on Friday by Communications Minister Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri.
She said that the discussions about news coverage included media reports of bias in news reporting and other events, and challenges made to the board by the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu).
The ministers and deputies present included Essop Pahad, the Minister in the Presidency, who is responsible for the government’s communications; Jeff Radebe, the Transport Minister and a senior member of the ANC’s national executive; Pallo Jordan, the Minister of Arts and Culture, who was once communications minister and a former head of the ANC’s propaganda department; and Makhenkesi Stofile, the Sports and Recreation Minister
Also present were deputy ministers from the departments of finance, communications, and sports and recreation.
The ministers also discussed sporting matters with the board, including broadcasting television and radio rights and their readiness for the 2010 Soccer World Cup, Matsepe-Casaburri said.
Dene Smuts, the Democratic Alliance spokesperson on communications, who asked the question, said she did not see the meeting as in any way sinister. She asked it because of a statement made to Business Day by the group chief executive of the SABC, Dali Mpofu, that Pahad has attended a meeting of the SABC board and had yelled at him and told the board to get rid of him.
Smuts said on Friday that she believes the board is quite right to have sacked Mpofu. She said that Mpofu was responsible for losing the SABC two sets of broadcast rights. ”No CEO would survive that in the private sector,” she said.
She also believes that the strategic plan presented to Parliament for the medium-term period was a ”shockingly bad document”, which projected a R2-billion loss over the three years, and put forward half-baked and unacceptable ideas to bridge that gap — such as an additional broadcast levy over and above the licence fee and an appeal for the government to excuse the broadcaster from value-added tax.
Smuts said these two proposals could explain the presence of the deputy finance minister at the meeting. The two sports ministers would be there to talk about the SABC’s readiness for 2010, for which the SABC is not ready, in her view. — I-Net Bridge