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Opinionista

The SABC crisis and the real questions we must ask

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William Bird is the director of Media Monitoring Africa, Ashoka and a Linc Fellow.

Muvhango is an apt name, not only for the successful soapie, but perhaps more appropriately for the SABC, as directly translated it means "ongoing troubles". Yet again the SABC is mired in controversy, yet again there are issues about the appointments processes; there will be another investigation. Blah, blah, blah, we have heard it all before. Maybe, though, we’re asking all the wrong questions.

We have had more embarrassing revelations about the goings-on at the SABC than Fifa had corruption scandals. There has been some excellent analysis and quality reporting, but still nobody seems surprised any longer. Perhaps because people have come to expect the worst from our public broadcaster, but perhaps also because of the fact that those with power over the SABC keep doing the same thing, and expecting a different outcome.

We have heard too many Ministers of Communications telling us the same thing, about how important the SABC is and how we must stabilise the institution. Good for the Department of Communications, as it really saves them on speech writers. And let’s not even get started on the Department of Communications either – perhaps the only real competition for senior leadership bad choices and instability (I hasten to add not all those in senior leadership are bad or have been bad, but the propensity to chose the worst of a bad bunch seems almost deliberate).

The real tragedy of the SABC is that the problems are not that hard to solve and despite a rational response to cringe over some of Mr Motsoeneng’s editorial musings, not even he is the biggest problem. Indeed he is a symptom of an ongoing cycle. A cycle of a lack of real political will to meaningfully address the governance issues at SABC.

They arise from a couple of basic flaws:

The role of the Minister in appointment process of senior executives (we have seen over the latest scandals that the Minister’s role has been central, when in fact it should in terms of the current law be largely rubber stamp support of the Board).

The SABC is caught between a rock and a hard place. They are a public broadcaster with a confused mandate, and no clear charter; they have to fulfil public service obligations and yet they have to operate as a commercial broadcaster. We lurch from mind-numbingly bad programming, like Days of our Lives, which may be popular but is purely commercial, and the utterly bizarre (Andre Rieu every weekend, since December 2013) to flashes of great programming, on radio, and a few gems of local content programming on TV.

We expect everything from our public broadcaster, and slam them when they don’t deliver – as we should. Added to this mix is a truly toxic culture of self-censorship, where some believe they need to act in a manner that would please either Number One or Number Two. Whether this need is real or imagined is virtually immaterial at this point.

The thing is, in 2008, during yet another leadership and board crisis, Parliament had an opportunity to address and help resolve these issues; perhaps not the mandate and dual nature of the broadcaster, but certainly the role of the Minister, and appointments processes. A deliberate choice was made not to address the real challenges and instead obfuscate and defer them, until hey presto, here we are again six years later and… Well, we all know how to say ‘repeat’.

The real question, therefore, is not why Mr Motsoeneng has been appointed, or whether he is actually doing more harm than good, nor is it the role of the Minister, or even the role of the board in failing to follow basic procedures for employment. The question isn’t even why we have not seen any real action on the report of the Special Investigations Unit, the Auditor General Report, the Skills Audit or the Public Protector’ report. The real question isn’t even how in hell’s name we can have one man playing schmaltz every single weekend (even during the World Cup), no: as nature-defying as Andre Rieu and his hair are, the real question is simply the question of interest:

Whose interest does it serve to have an SABC that lurches from crisis to crisis, that is under-skilled, where senior management is consistently unstable and where they have to answer both to a board and a minister? Whose interest does it serve to have an SABC that seeks to entrench a culture of self-censorship? Whose interests does it serve to dissuade risk-making programming? Whose interests does it serve to see it enter sweetheart deals with commercial satellite broadcasters?

When we start to answer those questions, then we can start to see where we need to focus our efforts and reporting. Perhaps looking for those answers is too frightening to contemplate; instead we choose to pick on the easy but misguided targets. Well and fine, but then you’d think we would want to do something different – and not merely push repeat. DM

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