‘Hlaudi boasted about being close to Zuma’
He sunk SABC, says former CEO
Former SABC CEO Lulama Mokhobo told the Zondo commission how Hlaudi Motsoeneng boasted about his proximity to former president Jacob Zuma to bully executives and the board at the public broadcaster.
It was for this reason that Motsoeneng unilaterally signed a deal with MultiChoice in 2013 which robbed the SABC of hundreds of millions of rands of potential revenue.
Mokhobo yesterday said Motsoeneng flexed his muscles to the point of telling people that he frequently visited Zuma and would sometimes only leave at 2am.
Motsoeneng apparently opposed the government’s digital migration strategy, which would have seen the SABC move into the age of digital terrestrial television (DTT), which was going to enable households with TV sets to connect through set-top box (STB) decoders.
But because the move would have threatened the dominance of pay TV channels, said Mokhobo, Motsoeneng became their “soldier” at Auckland Park, intimidating and purging everyone who agreed with the government’s policy on digital migration.
Mokhobo said the professional relationship with Motsoeneng soured from the onset when she joined the institution.
She said even the SABC at the time, which had initially defended Motsoeneng’s “disruptive style of leadership”, woke up to the reality that he was a “very, very dangerous man” when he wanted individuals removed by wrongly suggesting they were implicated in improper conduct.
The memorandum of agreement Motsoeneng entered into with MultiChoice injected only R500m into the public broadcaster, which according to Mokhobo, was “too little” compared to the revenue the SABC would have generated by going digital.
Mokhobo created a scenario of how much SABC would have made last year had it gone the DDT route instead of continuing with its channels being hosted on DStv.
She said the SABC, with a monthly subscription of R40 for an STB decoder, would have collected more than R1bn just last year, a period in which DStv subscription revenue in the country was R40bn, thanks in part to people who had subscribed to access SABC channels.
“There were people who reported to other important people in powerful places and they would throw their weight around and impose their will,” said Mokhobo.
“He [Motsoeneng] had told me many times how he was close to the president [Zuma] and how he had stayed at the president’s house until 2am...”
She said Motsoeneng had made several attempts to “discard me” for her principled stance on the MultiChoice deal and at some point she was named “w.w.w.”, standing for “wafika, wadla, walala”, loosely translated, “she came, ate, and went to sleep”.