(Graphic: John McCann/M&G)
Seventy-one years ago this month, Harold Laski died. The legacy of the political theorist and economist was aptly captured by Edward Shils and Michael Young in their essay, The Meaning of the Coronation. In the essay, Laski’s observations on the monarchy refer to the “eulogy of its habits that have reached a level of intensity more comparable with religious ecstasy of the 17th century — when men could still believe in the divine right of kings — than of the scientific temper of the 20th century”.
The British monarchy — and its practices — has been a source of awe, scorn, admiration and ridicule for centuries.
As the tides of social interactions evolved, the monarchy’s symbolism — often called tradition — remained a reference point to a bygone age. Such was the aura and mystique of the monarchy, the question of televising the coronation in 1953 became a national crisis. Then prime minister Winston Churchill was adamant that televising it was a vulgarity the monarchy could do without.
In spite of his reservations, the permission for the BBC to carry the event live was granted. Ahead of the event, television sales skyrocketed and the applications for TV licences rose more than 50%. Underpinning this spike, was the idea that the coronation was indeed a public event.
Public events of this nature — whether coronations, state funerals, general elections or news content — have always been subjected to the simple question of who should pay for them. The nature of public services is that dissemination should not discriminate: the news of the day ought to be accessible to all citizens, regardless of their means.
Any approach that seeks to link the question of access to that of affordability leaves poorer citizens without the ability to dissect the actions of the public servants who are the custodians of public resources. That harms democracy when the basis for selecting leaders — information regarding what they plan to do and how they propose to do it — is denied to the general public.
Public broadcasters, therefore, form an important pillar of modern democracies. In regulating them, legislators seek to balance independence and equity. In pursuing independence, public broadcasters need to avoid being turned into a mouthpiece of the government of the day.
The equity variable is the great challenge of modern times. In a country like South Africa, the principles of equity require all 11 official languages to be catered for. Balancing that social mandate with the business sustainability question is the greatest challenge for SABC.
The way capitalism has worked out, is that the primary source of income — advertising — is dependent on the discretion of the advertisers. When so many stations with different customer profiles exist, the spending patterns vary and some stations are not profitable on a standalone basis.
But it is precisely those stations that need to be kept alive by the public. In a country with wide income disparities, the spending patterns of advertisers run the risk of amplifying the divide. If an advertiser wants to target LSM 8-10, the small regional stations in a rural environment are unlikely to receive any of that spend.
The lack of ad spend threatens the viability of such a station and amplifies the business case for shutting it down. The problem is that those same citizens are not in a position to migrate to private broadcasters; hence, if the public broadcaster disappears from view, that community’s access to information disappears.
An equally important complication relates to government funding. A heavy reliance on state funding means that public broadcasters have to hope that political administrations do not use the public funds as a bargaining chip for influencing the broadcaster.
South Africa’s experiences with this conundrum are well documented. When the National Party was in charge, it believed the SABC was an extension of its propaganda machine. At the dawn of democracy, the hope was that such an era would never rise again. But the modern-day ANC — rather than respecting the broadcaster’s autonomy — unleashed an alliance of deployees, from Snuki Zikalala to Hlaudi Motsoeneng, who sought to revive Pik Botha’s philosophy for managing the SABC.
Recently, as the SABC sought to restructure its operations, the most recent ANC deployee — Stella Ndabeni-Abrahams — used the bailout to interfere with the operational mandate of the broadcaster.
RELATED
The inherent limitations of state funding and commercial revenue mean the public funding option will always be part of the solution. Historically, the SABC has relied on TV licences as the primary instrument for getting the public to fund the “unfunded mandate”.
The current rate — R265 a year — is less than a rand a day. But its success rate remains remarkably poor. At the heart of it, is the fact that most citizens fail to see the value of the SABC TV channels. Secondly, the collection model — depending on individuals remembering to pay or fearing the consequence of not doing so — is not particularly useful in a country with low rates of compliance.
As we have seen in the e-tolls saga, South Africans have an aversion to systems that run parallel to pre-existing systems. When the government alters the fuel levy, it forms part of the existing fuel price and no one experiences it as an additional, standalone transaction. When citizens pay the tourism levy, it forms part of the price charged by the hotel, hence the scope for resistance is nonexistent. In spite of such evidence, the SABC model continues to operate in a nuisance format.
The SABC’s best chance of enforcing payment is through the requirement for a licence to be produced at the point of acquiring a TV set. But such a model works on presumptions that have long ceased to make sense.
Firstly, the presumption that TV sets serve as a proxy for numbers of people that use the SABC’s services has long lost relevance. Far too many citizens access SABC services through alternative channels — and that’s just the TV services.
What has always baffled me about the SABC, is the idea that a public broadcaster — with many more radio stations than TV channels — should assume that its public mandate ought to be funded from the prism of TV access rather than access to all its broadcast services. Secondly, the idea that South Africans will be benevolent enough to pencil in an anniversary of their licence payments, has proven to be a false premise.
This week, the SABC proposed a universal household levy to address its collection problems. The proposed levy would be charged to all households — however defined — and would replace the current licensing model. The most useful thing about levies is that they can be directed to a specific purpose. But although this represents an idea worth exploring, the flaws are already glaring.
The idea that a household is a proxy for the use of SABC services is as fundamentally flawed as the use of TV sets as a proxy. Far too many citizens live in households without a TV but with access to SABC content and services. Such households will naturally reject the idea of a levy.
Secondly, the household model requires an understanding of the socioeconomic dynamics underpinning human settlements in South Africa. There are households that — according to the government itself — aren’t actually households because they have been erected without permission. There are households where the family income is non-existent.
In the SABC’s approach, such households would be classified as indigent and exempt from paying. The cost associated with compiling that data is one that the SABC — and the government — cannot afford.
Thirdly, the idea that when such households are identified then collections will materialise, is ambitious at best. For example, the number of registered taxpayers on the South African Revenue Service (Sars) database is a fraction of the households the SABC seeks to target. The use of Sars resources doesn’t solve this problem. Another proposal suggests using Multichoice infrastructure to collect on behalf of the SABC.
Again, the flaws are obvious. Multichoice has in recent years lamented the rise of competitors that do not require the TV sets and decoders that traditionally underpinned its model. In this scenario, no citizen will click on the SABC licence as an additional payment to be executed.
The power and influence of TV remains undeniable — as Queen Elizabeth was reminded this week — but unlike the anachronism of the monarchy, the funding model needs to evolve. The SABC’s idea just doesn’t cut it
Khaya Sithole is a chartered accountant, academic, activist, Mail & Guardian columnist and host of Power Perspective on Power FM