Two weeks ago, a rather rare event in the governance and management of public entities occurred when Madoda Mxakwe vacated his seat as the CEO of the SABC. Mxakwe’s exit at the end of his five-year contract at the SABC represented the first time in ages that a CEO at the SABC had completed his term. The public broadcaster has been bedevilled by governance and leadership crises that shared strong intersections with its position as a public entity and one that plays an important role in the information discourse in the country. The ANC government’s approach to managing the asset has been a story of continuously trying to treat the public broadcaster as a state broadcaster while simultaneously plunging it into a policy and funding drift.
The mistaken perception of the SABC as a state broadcaster can be traced back to how the National Party dealt with it and how the ANC tried to replicate this model even though it stated its commitment not to do so. In November 1992, secretary-general Cyril Ramaphosa was quoted saying “The ANC believes that unquestioning loyalty by a public broadcaster to a ruling party is incompatible with democracy.” Yet when Snuki Zikalala was appointed to head up its news department, he failed to detach himself from his prior role as a government spokesperson. In 2006, his blacklisting of public commentators he regarded as critical of the ANC, and in particular then president Thabo Mbeki, resulted in the editorial crisis that was ventilated through the Sisulu Commission. The editorial crisis naturally manifested into a legitimacy crisis that the SABC could ill-afford particularly at a time when private broadcaster alternatives stood ready to capitalise on the gap.
The historical chaos from the newsroom to the executive suite mirrored the instability of the boards of the SABC. As the SABC grappled with its execution of a public mandate when its news editorial staff had historic involvements with the political class and executives appointed also had significant political credentials, it also faced commercial headwinds as the broadcasting industry evolved around it. In 2016, Media Monitoring Africa revealed that the SABC’s coverage of major political parties ahead of the local government elections was significantly biased towards the ANC which received double the coverage of the DA and five times the coverage given to the EFF. While this may have reflected a wider range of electioneering events associated with the ANC’s much wider national footprint, the allegations of bias do not help a public broadcaster’s standing. The appointment of Hlaudi Motsoeneng as COO shifted the SABC into new crisis points that the equally fragile boards seemed unable and unwilling to address.
When Mxakwe started his term in 2018, the SABC had received a new lease on its governance life when the 2016 parliamentary inquiry into the SABC had provided insights into what had gone wrong and later, the high court ruling affirming the board’s autonomy in the appointment of executives. This detached the SABC from the habitual interference of politicians whose involvement had precipitated the crisis.
The positive result of these developments is that the board and the CEO managed to complete their terms and indicate that with the right legal protections, state enterprises can have leadership and governance stability. What remained elusive for them, however, was the question of finding the right model for addressing the SABC’s sustainability question.
The dependence on the state for core funding at a time when public finances are under pressure; and the inability to grow its commercial profitability, means that the SABC as an organisation remains fragile and given its importance to the public especially ahead of an election year, a solution to its funding crisis needs to be found. The problem is that those core to the decision-making, have a rather complicated history with the SABC which makes the chances of getting this right, remarkably remote.
• Sithole (@coruscakhaya) is an accountant, academic and activist.
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