Publications
Partners
In the past few days, we witnessed yet another grand exodus at the leadership level of the SABC while the corporation tinkers near the end of it’s existence – literally. There is no money in the bank to pay suppliers and content providers, never mind staff salaries past March next year.
The SABC board, both interim and permanent, has been running around, cap in hand, looking for funds to recapitalise the SABC. All the while, Parliament has delayed filling the first four vacancies advertised in July and now a new minister has entered the building, in the name of protecting workers’ rights yet with no recapitalisation plan in hand. We are at an impasse.
What is it that we Africans say when elephants fight? The grass withers? Well the grass has certainly withered at the SABC and no one seems interested in stopping the fight – never mind tending to the greenery.
MEDIA ECONOMY
First, the digital media economy with all its benefits to media enterprises globally has presented multiple challenges in the form of an abundance of content, audience fragmentation and disruptions to the traditional advertising business models that once sustained them.
The South African media sector has not been immune to these challenges. Dr Glenda Daniels, associate professor in media studies at Wits, rightfully noted with concern that the once more than 10 000-strong army of media workers and journalists in South Africa had been slashed to almost half that number within a decade. This number would increase sharply if the SABC were to continue to be left without financial resources in the next few weeks.
While some, motivated by corruption fatigue and state-owned enterprise bailout fatigue, might be quick to dismiss the SABC and call for its outright closure because of the financial and political woes, they should consider that these challenges are not unique and they are certainly not a good reason for us to give up on our public broadcaster.
Indeed, rather than making public broadcasting irrelevant, these challenges make public broadcasting more important than ever. This is because in an increasingly market-driven media landscape, that has already been consolidated and centralised to worrying degrees, there would be ever-decreasing incentives for commercial media to take up the full mandate of public service media.
A media landscape with no public broadcaster, therefore, would be one dominated by commercial, private media, the primary responsibility of which is to profit by maximising audiences for advertising revenues. Commercial media are predominantly governed by market dynamics in which media content is developed to draw large audiences that include representatives of the advertisers’ desired demographic, at the lowest possible cost to the advertiser. Often these demographics do not include the poor, the marginalised and those in far-flung rural areas, who are already excluded from participating in various political, social and economic processes.
POLITICAL INTERFERENCE
Second, the SABC does not have a leadership crisis. It has a political crisis that has kept it in cyclical instability for almost a decade. Longer if one goes back to 1993 when the first cohort of ANC-connected cadres were appointed to its leadership structures.
We have a well-documented history of both good and not so great people playing musical chairs at the SABC board level and, more often than not, the DJ giving the musical cue has been some political actor or another.
We can now count on both hands the number of ministers that the ruling party has given us in the past decade alone. We also have piles of Special Investigating Unit reports, skills audit reports, Auditor-General reports and more – all detailing the disastrous effects of political interference in what was meant to be a flagship democratic project. Or so we thought …
In a speech in November 1992, then ANC secretary-general and now President Cyril Ramaphosa, said: “The ANC believes that unquestioning loyalty by a public broadcaster to a ruling party is incompatible with democracy – whether or not the ruling party enjoys the support of the majority of the population.
“When the ANC wins the electoral support of the majority of South Africans, it will not seek to replace the National Party as the subject of the SABC’s slavish loyalty. And we want to establish both the principle and practice of that independence now.
“The ANC is committed to public broadcasting that is independent of the government of the day and which owes its loyalty not to any party but to the population.”
Mr President, here is the receipt. We are here to collect on the independent public broadcaster that we were promised in 1992; the one that is free from all forms of political interference.
Please see to it that the SABC is able to work towards recapitalisation through the provision of a government guarantee so that its creditors and lenders have some comfort that government is behind it and to give the SABC time to implement its proposed strategy.
Mr President, the grass has withered so please stop the elephants from fighting and give the people of South Africa an independent and well-funded public broadcaster committed to providing excellent, credible programming and fulfilling its democratic role.
Makuse is the national coordinator of the SOS: Support Public Broadcasting Coalition
