The SABC has not had a board for nearly a month now. The role of the board at the public broadcaster cannot be overemphasised in a country where millions of people rely on it for news and information.
Even the ANC once acknowledged that a functioning democracy needs a vibrant and independent media, pledging in 1992 to open up the airwaves for new commercial broadcasters and to turn the SABC from a propaganda tool for the apartheid government into a media organisation with unwavering loyalty to the public.
When the ANC began to govern in the mid-1990s, the SABC was hailed as a site of excellence, enjoying the support of the public at home and elsewhere on the continent, where strongmen such as Robert Mugabe, the former Zimbabwean president, and Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, used tough security and media laws to keep their grip on power.
Unfortunately, as most are aware, it did not take long before the ANC-led government started stifling independent journalism and meddling in the broadcaster’s operational affairs as politicians jostled to gain control of the airwaves to advance their factional agendas. Others went blatantly after its purse.
It got worse when Jacob Zuma ascended to the presidency in 2009. At the time, its second-highest executive, COO Hlaudi Motsoeneng, unashamedly and publicly turned it into a megaphone for the ANC, trashing a well-thought-out constitutional mandate to serve the public — and making clear that the SABC’s autonomy only existed on paper.
In 2019, a commission of inquiry into editorial interference at the SABC found that the “spectre of the ANC” hovered over the public broadcaster’s newsroom between 2012 and 2017. These findings were later painfully confirmed by revelations from multiple witnesses at the Zondo commission of inquiry into state capture.
And the result: the SABC had completely lost the trust of one of its biggest sources of income, the public, by the time a new, post-state-capture board was installed a few years ago. The board, whose term expired in mid-October, was forced to devote much of its attention to restoring trust in the broadcaster’s journalism and fixing its lopsided balance sheet.
The plan to improve the broadcaster’s financial health is gaining traction, and it was reassuring that there were men and women committed to their primary role of reaffirming the broadcaster’s independence. They wanted to ensure the needs and interests of its diverse audience are met and to break with the state capture era. Few dispute the importance of this mandate to deepening our democracy.
The absence of the board threatens to reverse some of these gains. For one thing, policy decisions on everything from news editorial guidelines to programming regulations and local content policy are on hold until a new board is appointed. It means the SABC’s three executive directors, the CEO, COO and CFO, could pass up an opportunity to enter into a lucrative programming contract for fear it could be overturned by the incoming board. Worse still, the longer it takes the politicians — who have cited the dysfunctional state security vetting system for the delay — the harder it becomes for the incoming board to overturn policy mistakes, especially editorial blunders.
The hiatus could not have come at a worse time for SA’s democracy. It opens the door for the ANC, which has deployed its cadres in executive leadership positions, to use the public broadcaster to advance its agenda and boost its prospects in the 2024 national elections. It is not out of the question that the ANC could lose its majority after its share of the vote in the 2021 local government elections fell below 50% for the first time from almost 56% in the 2016 local government elections and 58% in the 2019 general election
For the elections to be described as free and fair, SA will need an independent SABC, the source of news for most South Africans. It starts with the timeous appointment of the board at the public broadcaster.
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