SACP welcomes SABC board chairperson's belated resignation, but calls for further action
19 December 2016
SABC board chairperson, Professor Mbulaheni Maghuve, the last man standing resigned on Monday, 19 December 2016. Professor Maghuve was chairperson without a board. It was no longer a question of if, but when and how he would go. The SACP welcomes his belated resignation.
Parliament must set in motion a process towards an interim board as a matter of urgency, whilst at the same time deliberating very seriously about the quality and intergrity of people to be appointed to the SABC board, especially the chairperson. In particular we need to ensure that people appointed to key positions in the board are not people who will treat their appointment as a means of (additional) income, but a patriotic duty to serve the nation.
Parliament must also continue with its probe into the shenanigans at the SABC, to get to the root of the problems: How and why could the disasters at the public broadcaster have occurred on such a scale. Who else was involved in the governance decay that ended up with a total collapse in governance at the SABC?
There are SABC board members who were removed illegally and others resigned for various reasons. Parliament must still investigate how board members were removed illegally. The SABC is governed by the public broadcasting law which was violated when those SABC board members were illegally removed. Let us not lose focus on how and why they were summarily removed.
They disagreed with the appointment of Hlaudi Motsoeneng as SABC COO and the collusive deal he signed, selling out at a pittance SABC archives and handing over such strategic national resources to a private company, MultiChoice, a subsidiary of Naspers, an apartheid-era mouthpiece of the Broederbond and Afrikaner monopoly capital. Yet Hlaudi Motsoeneng's uncritical supporters shower him with praises as the so-called transformation guru.
The SACP wishes to reiterate its call that this illegal deal between the SABC and MutiChoice must be scrapped, and for Koos Becker and Imtiaz Patel to be summoned before Parliament, to amongst others explain how and why they hollowed out the strategic capacity of the public broadcaster and stifled its financial sustainability.
The whole analogue to digital terrestrial television migration and associated policy u-turns both at the SABC and in the Department of Communications must be investigated. The net effect of the SABC-MultiChoice deal and those policy u-turns against encryption is that Naspers through its subsidiary MultiChoice will retain its not less than 98 percent monopoly of the pay TV market.
The SACP will intensify its campaigns on all these fronts in order to ensure that the SABC is liberated from corporate capture and corruption as well as to drive demonopolisation of the media in our country.
Issued by Alex Mohubetswane Mashilo, National Spokesperson, SACP, 19 December 2016
