Sudden resignation of SABC Acting CEO
27 June 2016
The South African Communist Party (SACP) noted the resignation of the South African Broadcasting Corporation’s (SABC’s) Acting Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Mr Jimi Matthews with immediate effect this morning. We welcome his principled stance to refuse to subject himself to this unhealthy environment at the SABC. The resignation should be seen as the latest indicator of continuing administrative and governance decay at the SABC following last week’s suspension of three media workers at the public broadcaster, economics editor Thandeka Gqubule, Radio Sonder Grense executive producer Foeta Krige and senior journalist Suna Venter.
The SACP also calls upon the SABC Board to make its stance known about these developments which are tantamount to the worst perversion and destruction of some of the most fundamental principles of public broadcasting.
The SACP has consistently expressed its views against the wrong things happening at the SABC. We have also embarked on mass action in the past to highlight some of these. On 21 October 2012 we embarked on a march to the SABC demanding, among other things, more space and time for progressive local content and decisive action against the hollowing out of the SABC resulting from corporate capture by amongst others Naspers through its subsidiary Multi-Choice. Our protest march was blacked-out by the SABC in a manner not dissimilar to the recent action taken at the SABC that has led to the suspensions of the three journalists last week.
The SACP is the first political party in South Africa that was banned by the apartheid regime in 1950, including the banning of our media and publications. It is unfortunate that even post-1994 we have continued to suffer instances of some of our activities being censored by the SABC.
It is because of some of these experiences that the SACP has always been in the forefront of the struggle against embedded and shoddy journalism both at the public broadcaster and in the private bourgeoisie media. It is in line with this struggle, undertaken as one of the key objectives of our well-known media transformation campaign, that we characterised the latest editorial policy decreeing banning of certain aspects protest footages at the SABC as both draconian and a danger to the kind of public broadcaster and society we seek to build. In fact such draconian measures threaten to reverse all the gains we have made over the past twenty-two years in transforming the public broadcaster.
The SACP reiterates its strong condemnation of the destruction of public property during protest marches. However the condemnation of such actions must not be a license for draconian measures to censor news.
Issued by Alex Mohubetswane Mashilo, National Spokesperson, SACP, 27 June 2016
