While suspended SABC official Hlaudi Motsoeneng
The SABC is about to ask the treasury for yet another bailout, its chairperson, Khanyisile Kweyama, said this week.
The details are not public yet but the broadcaster’s recently appointed interim board is “in the process of finalising” a funding request. “We are working 24/7 with our executive authority, the department of communications, to engage with treasury on our behalf,” she said.
Just four days before this disclosure, the new communications minister, Ayanda Dlodlo, said there were no discussions about a bailout, and that the focus was on reviving its revenue instead.
But two insiders said the deeper the new board digs, the worse the SABC’s books look.
Hopes that a guarantee from the treasury – instead of cold hard cash – could help the SABC to plug the holes are dwindling fast, they said. It will take “a couple of hundred million rands”, one said. It seemed as if everyone was trying to avoid the psychologically disturbing figure of R1-billion, which has been rumoured.
Asked whether the SABC expected the treasury to be amenable to the request, the insider replied grimly: “It’s not like they have a choice.”
Nor will there be much time to ponder the request. Some of the smaller production houses responsible for the local content broadcast by SABC television channels will start going into liquidation by the end of May, television producer Mfundi Vundla said.
“There are companies I know that are going to have to start laying off people in weeks [and] that will close in June,” he said, after a meeting of the Independent Producers’ Organisation (IPO) on Wednesday.
Members of that organisation have called for a content strike to force the SABC’s hand but this doesn’t yet have majority support, Vundla said.
“The prevailing view was that we need to press for an urgent meeting with the minister,” he said.
In comparing notes, producers found what one described as “haphazard” payments from the SABC.
“Some producers have been paid and some have not,” said Bongiwe Selane, a member of the IPO executive, who is currently not doing business with the SABC. “There are back-payments for work done in March, but they are not paying all of it. There are producers who can’t plan, who don’t know if they can pay their crews and suppliers and actors.”
All the producers directly affected refused to speak on the record, citing the importance of their relationships with the broadcaster, but they spoke about mutinous staff, threatening banks and looming disaster.
Producers “remain top of our priority list for attention”, Kweyama said.
What’s on the interim board’s plate
The interim board of the SABC is working its way through a to-do list provided by Parliament after its ad-hoc committee investigation into the public broadcaster. These are some of the tasks set by that committee:
- A forensic investigation into questionable and irregularly awarded contracts;
- “Appropriate steps” against individuals found to have been responsible for dubious spending;
- Efforts to hold “financially accountable” individuals responsible for losses because of “unilateral changes to the policies”, such as the 90% local music content quota; and
- An evaluation of “the feasibility of the business case for entering into agreements with rival broadcasters”, such as DSTV and ANN7.
But on top of just about everyone else’s list seems to be Hlaudi Motsoeneng, the suspended SABC executive currently on a public-speaking road show while drawing his full salary.
Although they would love to give the interim board “space to breathe”, as one supplier to the SABC put it this week, the fact that Motsoeneng remains on the broadcaster’s payroll is a major concern.
“If they can’t get rid of him, if he comes back, even if there is a bailout, we’ll never see that money,” said the supplier. “You might as well set tax money on fire.”
Motsoeneng also remains central to a seemingly disconnected series of campaigns to have the interim board removed quickly, incidentally before it completes forensic investigations.
One group, made up of former Economic Freedom Fighter members and supporters of the Black First Land First group, this week demanded that the entire interim board be removed because it is opposed to local content and is in the pay of so-called white monopoly capital. It said this is why the board feared Motsoeneng, who had unilaterally imposed a
90% local music quota on all SABC radio stations.
This decision had cost the SABC R183-million to date, the deputy board chairperson, Mathatha Tsedu, told MPs last week, because audiences and then advertisers had gone elsewhere.
This statement was seized on by a social media campaign this week, which it said is proof that veteran journalist Tsedu is the enemy of the people. Apparently not connected to Black First Land First, the campaign called for a wide range of action using tag lines inspired by recent American political campaigns, such as #BlackArtistsMatter and #OccupySABC, as well as #NoToAmericanCultural-Imperialism, with no apparent irony.
Tsedu referred all questions to Kweyama, who said her board has been properly appointed and “will not be distracted by other agendas”.
Motsoeneng’s supporters are calling for the disciplinary action to be abandoned and for his reinstatement (preferably as chief executive of the SABC). His lawyer Zola Majavu said Motsoeneng is frustrated by not yet having had the equivalent of his day in court.
He had not heard from the SABC for more than a week, he said, after Motsoeneng had met a tight deadline to respond to new charges – that his public comments had brought the SABC into disrepute.
Kweyama said she and the SABC would not discuss the details of disciplinary matters in public.
Majavu said it is “interesting” that the Democratic Alliance has not gone to court to force the pace of the disciplinary hearing, as it had done to demand that the SABC follow the public protector’s recommendation that he be disciplined.
DA federal chairperson James Selfe said: “We have some sympathy with the [interim] board, with the fact that they inherited a wasteland.”
But, he added, echoing the sentiments of producers, suppliers, SABC staff and nongovernmental organisations, “it is important that we keep their feet to the fire”.