» Get some popcorn. This is going to be a long show …

Get some popcorn. This is going to be a long show …

February 11th, 2009

One things has become clear – the saga of the SABC board is going to drag on for months, leaving the organisation with uncertain leadership at a time when it is under serious political and financial pressure.

President Kgalema Motlanthe sent the SABC Bill back to the parliamentary committee this week on the grounds that it would not be constitutional to give Parliament the power to dismiss the board without due process. The Bill only allows for an inquiry, a vote in the committee and a vote in the House – and that clearly does not meet the requirements of administrative law and the right to a fair hearing and treatment.

But due process will mean that this matter takes a long time. The Parliamentary committee – which, it must be remembered, is just trying to undo its own foolishness in the way it appointed this board – will have to present a case, have a proper hearing and allow for right of reply before taking it to a vote. That is going to be neither easy nor straightforward. Presenting a case will be complicated, and this is a committee which has not shown a great deal of competence in getting this stuff right. And the Board has made it clear that it will fight for its independence and rights, and that will mean a long drawn out process – and an outcome which will probably be challenged in court.

So, settle in for a long-term battle.

Meanwhile, all the signs are that the SABC is going to follow so many other parastatals in posting huge losses. Advertising expenditure appears to have dropped across the board by about 30% since October last year. If SABC suffering as much as anyone else, this would mean losses in revenue of about R1-bn over a year. This supports the reports that it is in overdraft to the tune of about R400-m already.

This after the organisation had already seen profits drop to a modest R78-m last year.

So on top of the political crisis, comes a financial one. And one that will hit at a time when the board is tied up in political battles, the organisation has an acting CEO and uncertainty abounds as parliament tries to put in a new board.

The biggest problem with this is that it will allow everyone to blame someone else. The board will probably blame the CEO they fired, Dali Mpofu; he will undoubtedly blame either them or his acting successor; who in turn has no shortage of people he can blame. Everyone, of course, can blame the global economic downturn. And they will probably be right about that.

Entry Filed under: Anton Harber, Media regulation, Radio, TV

Some HTML allowed:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

Trackback this post | Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed

Anton Harber: Media

Professor Anton Harber directs the Journalism and Media Studies Programme at Wits University. He is former editor of the Mail & Guardian.
Full bio

Daily newspaper sales, South Africa
(Ave sales Jul-Dec)
1960 - 681 053 (Population 17,3m)
1970 - 723 566 (22m)
1980 - 803 229 (27,5m)
1990 - 1 214 396 (35,2m)
2000 - 1 117 886 (44m)
2006 - 1 600 000 (47,3m)
2011 - 1 310 000 (49m)

(Sources: ABC and nationmaster.com)

“It was pure political theatre. The excited room was filled with government officials, government consultants, quasi-government agencies, politicians and pupils from government schools. As if on cue, the room rang with applause as one education victory after another was claimed. This was, after all, the annual drama in which the minister of basic education appears on stage to announce the Grade 12 National Senior Certificate (NSC) results …” - Educationist Jonathan Jansen, one of the few with the credibility to look critically at this “celebratory orgy of mediocrity”.

“The (Incwala) ceremony is cloaked in secrecy and marks the (Swaziland) king’s return to public life after a period of withdrawal and spiritual contemplation. Among its highlights is a symbolic demonstration by the king of his power and dominance in a process involving his penetration of a black bull … But last year’s selected bull, according to a recent account from a whistle-blowing Incwala initiate, objected strongly, and threw off Africa’s last absolute monarch.” - Some surprises in this (un-bylined) account of Swaziland politics in Southern African Report

“When the Great Zucchini arrived that Saturday morning, Don had no idea who he was. Frankly, he didn’t look like a great anything. He looked like a house painter, Don thought, with some justification. He wears no costume. He was in painter’s pants, a coffee-stained shirt and a two-day growth of beard. He toted his beat-up props in beat-up steamer trunks, with ripped faux leather and broken hinges hanging askew.” - A classic of magazine profiling, by Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post.

Diepsloot (Jonathan Ball, 2011)

Diesploot: Of Frogs and Fractals, a public lecture at the University of Johannesburg, 4 August 2011

Troublemakers - The Best of South Africa’s Investigative Journalism (Jacana, 2101), edited by Anton Harber and Margaret Renn

Introduction - The Troublemakers: An account of the rise of a new wave of investigative journalism in South Africa.

What is Left Unsaid: Reporting the South African HIV Epidemic, edited by Kristin Palitza, Natalie Ridgard, Helen Struthers and Anton Harber (Fanele, 2010)