The SABC’s endless farce
Motsoeneng gets a bonus and is redeployed
THE story of the SABC and its erratic chief operating officer, Hlaudi Motsoeneng, has now run the full gamut from oddity to tragedy to farce. The Sunday newspapers reported this weekend that Motsoeneng has been given an extraordinary R11.4m bonus in the same month the Supreme Court of Appeal dismissed his application for leave to appeal a ruling that set aside his permanent appointment. In addition, it is reported the SABC board has redeployed Motsoeneng as group executive for corporate affairs. If that does not constitute a flagrant violation of a legal stipulation, it is hard to know what does.
Just following the travails of the SABC is, in its own way, exhausting. The road of destruction, confusion and financial disintegration is beyond the craziest soap opera script that the SABC itself flights. And this is a public corporation, notionally with a public mandate monitored by an institution none other than Parliament itself. The very fact that this kind of craziness can exist is its own testament to the government’s dysfunctionality.
Just to recap on a few important points. First is that the SABC’s financial results in this year in which the chief operating officer was given this bonus were bordering on disastrous. It recorded a loss of R395m. It paid for the loss out of its cash reserves that were back then about R1bn.
The corporation’s latest financial results are due out next week and are expected to show a further depletion of reserves.
There are many flagrant examples of executive pay grants in the private sector but few like this. Incredibly, Motsoeneng’s salary increased by almost R1m over the year, to R3.8m. Motsoeneng, who is not now and never was the head of the SABC, now earns 30% more than the president.
The second point is Motsoeneng was notionally granted this bonus for negotiating a lucrative deal with pay-TV operator MultiChoice. Surely, it’s the job of executives to try to cut as good a deal for their employer as possible and bonuses are not awarded for contracts.
In addition, this deal itself has been questioned, because it both gave away the SABC’s own content for very little and tied the state broadcaster to the side of MultiChoice on the issue of decoder-encryption.
The encryption debate and the role of Motsoeneng and Communications Minister Faith Muthambi in pushing an outcome to favour MultiChoice so directly — despite this being the opposite of government policy — is also highly suspect.
And third, the case against Motsoeneng began with a report by the public protector that found he had lied about his credentials — very modest ones at that — when he applied for the job.
It is not a fatal flaw to have modest credentials; many South Africans have made substantial contributions to public life without impressive qualifications. But lying about your qualifications must surely be a bar not only to the particular job you have, but to all jobs within the organisation.
Lying about your qualifications must surely be a bar to the particular job you have and to all jobs in the organisation
And so, the farce continues. The DA is now going back to court to test exactly this point. It’s hard not to agree with DA federal executive chair James Selfe that the SABC’s decision is “a slap in the face of the rule of law”, and a desperate attempt to allow the “Hlaudi Motsoeneng wrecking ball to continue his disastrous reign at the public broadcaster”.
This might all be farcical, but behind the travesty lies a much larger and more important problem. Motsoeneng would not be able to get away with this without presidential support.
In order to anticipate this criticism, the presidency announced last week that it respected the decision of the court. Yet, obviously, Muthambi and the board of the SABC don’t feel this constitutes sufficient an indication of the president’s actual wishes, and therefore feel free to flout the court’s decision.
Clearly, President Jacob Zuma needs to be more specific.