Every year I have a little conversation with myself about whether to pay the absurd annual TV licence fee. It’s not a lot of money, I say, and I am legally (therefore ethically) required to pay. This is even though I am not a consumer of the SABC in any way.
Like many South Africans, I haven’t been an SABC TV watcher for decades. Like many South Africans (who can afford it) my primary news and entertainment source has been DStv.
Since Netflix and Showmax arrived and streaming services became the primary form of viewing, I have subscribed to those. Yet every year I have to pay for the upkeep of the national broadcasting body.
There was a time — many decades ago — when these licence fees had a point. They supported the SABC when it was the only broadcaster in the country. But those days are long gone, and, unless they have no other option, most people find their news and entertainment elsewhere.
If the SABC were more like Telkom and a going concern with an actual business plan, I might have felt compelled to support it. But the broadcaster is its own worst enemy or, more accurately, attempts by the government to control its editorial output are the enemy.
President Cyril Ramaphosa waited six months to appoint the present board. This caused the SABC’s stuttering finances to fall through the floor. Once again our taxes — TV licences are just another tax — are being squandered by the ANC as it pursues its own agenda at the expense of the country. This time Ramaphosa appeared to want to avoid appointing a board that included the SABC’s former head of news, Phathiswa Magopeni, who was shown to have an independent mind.
It’s difficult to work out whether that was Ramaphosa’s reasoning, because our nonpractising president is so mute and passive it’s hard to know what he is thinking. He certainly isn’t converting that into action.
This is the same SABC to which former president Jacob Zuma appointed the buffoon Hlaudi Motsoeneng as boss — only because he was a pliable minion who could be controlled. He was also an outrageous attention-seeker who spoke about himself in the third person.
Motsoeneng’s ill-fated 90% local content plan, which caused the SABC’s radio stations to haemorrhage advertising revenue, is one of the major reasons the public broadcaster is in trouble. As is his sunshine journalism instruction, which banned coverage of protests against the lack of service delivery.
The SABC is broke because successive ANC governments broke it. Demanding that we citizens pay for this dysfunctional service is absurd — even more so because it is still used by the governing party to push its election message.
Fikile Mbalula, the Daffy Duck of South African politics, complained that the SABC caused the ANC to lose ground in the 2021 local elections. Let’s also not forget how the broadcaster was manipulated by the National Party under apartheid. The SABC isn’t so much a public broadcaster as a government broadcaster — fulfilling the ANC’s wishes and not the public’s. Why should we still be paying for it?
* Shapshak is editor-in-chief of Stuff.co.za and executive director of Scrolla.Africa