» Just say no!

Just say no!

March 25th, 2009

Can you believe what the SABC Chief Financial Officer, Robin Nicholson, said in Business Day? He tried to make out that he was just a bookkeeper and should not be held responsible for their over-spending.

“My job is to make sure the systems and controls are in place. The fact that they’re overspending their budgets, I can only tell you,” Nicholson told Jocelyn Newmarch of Business Day.

“Finance is a consequence of strategy and actions. Don’t hold me to account for what others have done, unless I could have influenced it,” he said.

Hold on a minute: if, as you say, your job is make sure the controls are in place, why has spending gone out of control? And didn’t you know until it was too late? Don’t tell me that a CFO is unable to influence spending. Try saying ‘No!’, Mr Nicholson. Like this: ‘Sorry, we can’t afford a bureau in Jamaica’ or ‘Sorry, you have used up your budget for expensive overseas trips.’

His remarks sum up the problem at the SABC: nobody will take responsibility and everyone will blame someone else. When your CFO is saying that he just keeps the numbers and he has no responsibility for what they tell him, then an organisation is in deep trouble.

Read it here: http://allafrica.com/stories/200903200094.html

Entry Filed under: Anton Harber, Radio, TV

2 Comments Add your own

1. amandzing | April 7th, 2009 at 10:01 am

how is this surprising? especially when seen in the light of the npa decision on zuma…
2. Thought Leader » Mi&hellip | June 9th, 2009 at 11:24 am

[...] And, according to Beeld, “Millions of rands have been set aside by the SABC for the upgrading of its building’s foyer and the acquisition of luxury cars, while workers don’t even have proper broadcasting equipment. A senior TV news employee, who’s been with the SABC for years, said employees are particularly unhappy that ‘huge amounts of money are still being spent on luxury cars and millions on upgrading the foyer.’ Meanwhile essential broadcasting equipment is ‘in a poor condition and deteriorating quickly’.” Nicholson, it seems, feels that he should bear none of the blame for the SABC’s current financial plight, but this Pontius Pilate approach has not impressed Wits journalism professor and one of the founders of the Mail & Guardian, Anton Harber. [...]

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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)