Deep breaths at the SABC

CONTROVERSIAL SABC chief operating officer Hlaudi Motsoeneng this week described the organisation as a bus which everyone would be driving together. It’s the kind of awkward statement we’ve come to expect from a man who should, technically, be suspended, pending the outcome of an independent disciplinary inquiry.

The Public Protector’s findings against him are legendary. These include that he lied about having passed matric, irregularly inflated his own salary and purged staff who testified against him at a disciplinary hearing. Nonetheless, Motsoeneng is the man who has played chief executive as well as COO of the SABC for the past few months, after the somewhat hasty departure of Lulama Mokhobo.

Two years into her five-year term, word had it that it was simply too tough for Mokhobo to have her authority undermined by Motsoeneng. A settlement was made, and she left. Hence the bus reference, after a journalist asked the COO this week who would be steering the SABC now that it finally has a new CEO in consultant and former banking executive Frans Matlala.

Matlala’s brief has left us slightly confused, too. As far as we knew, Communications Minister Faith Muthambi as recently as this year insisted that the SABC was a state-owned enterprise, and could therefore be controlled by the ministry and, interestingly, the ANC – even though the latter is, of course, not the state but the ruling party.

Now it feels like Matlala has been given the task of turning the SABC into an independent organisation that shouldn’t find itself beholden to any politician or party.

That would be a remarkable leap forward, considering that the SABC has not been regarded as independent as such for at least a decade; and even before that, there was always a sense of it being a state-controlled entity, however benign, in the heady early days of democracy.

Since then, staff phones have been wiretapped and they’ve been warned to be loyal to the ANC while other parties have their airtime curtailed.

Matlala needs to take a very deep breath.