Siki’s vox pop rocks
‘The Big Debate’ is essential viewing, especially as the elections loom, writes Rebecca Davis
WE’VE known for some time that there is something rotten in the state of Auckland Park. Our beloved national broadcaster seems to lurch with each new week from one new leadership controversy to the next — the latest being public protector Thuli Madonsela’s finding that acting chief operating officer Hlaudi Motsoeneng treated himself to three salary increases in one financial year, while concealing the small matter that he’d lied about having matric on his application form.
This latter fact actually makes Motsoeneng a perfectly fitting SABC figurehead. In 2013, audit firm PwC established that the broadcaster had no less than 62% of employees on its books whose qualifications are “not authentic” or “incomplete”, including a finance administrator whose diploma was in beauty therapy. With Motsoeneng still firmly at the helm at the time of writing, despite the public protector’s report, weather at the SABC remains partly Hlaudi with a chance of scattered scandals.
One of the most telling recent signs that the broadcaster’s leadership was losing the plot was its embarrassing last-minute decision to can the chat show The Big Debate just before its second series was due on air, last November. It’s still unclear exactly why. The official line was that it’s not SABC policy to outsource editorial content, and that somehow nobody noticed The Big Debate’s existence throughout its first series. This is all actually quite possible, given the SABC’s shambolic administration, even though others will detect a more sinister design. But “why seek a conspiracy theory when an explanation of sheer incompetence also fits?”, as the Confucian proverb has it.
The Big Debate mess was a total own-goal for the SABC, since it also allowed rivals e.tv to ride in on a white horse and save the day by offering the show a new home. And thank goodness they did, because it would have been a criminal waste to see The Big Debate — one of the few homes for genuinely invigorating debate in this country — consigned to the dustbin.
Host Siki Mgabadeli is excellent: sy skrik vir niks. This fearlessness was never more in evidence than on what has possibly been their finest show of the second series this year — a recent discussion about the myth of the Rainbow Nation.
The show’s format brings together a panel of “experts” to discuss an issue, but also allows contributions from “ordinary South Africans” in the audience, who often provide the show’s most memorable moments. In the Rainbow Nation Big Debate, a self- identified Boer sporting Abraham Lincoln’s facial hair calmly told Mgabadeli that his people were the “rightful owners of the land”, and then proposed the return to a homeland system for each ethnic group. “We can leave Joburg to the . . . cosmopolitans,” he conceded, pronouncing “cosmopolitans” in a way that made it clear he considered it a synonym for “pederast”.
In the same show, a self-identified coloured man repeatedly criticised what he called the “zebra debate”, from which coloured South Africans were excluded. When Red October leader Sunette Bridges and performance poet Lebo Mashile got into a shouting match about who the country belonged to, this man furiously stormed onto the stage to yell: “It’s not your country! It’s my country!” Mgabadeli’s attempts to calm him down were met with a cry of: “I’m tired of your black colonisation!”
Are strategists for the major political parties watching The Big Debate? They should be. As Mashile pointed out, “The reality of South Africa is what happened in this studio.” That reality is angry, loud, sometimes irrational and sometimes thoughtful, alternately heartbreaking and humorous. South Africa in a nutshell. • ‘The Big Debate’ airs on eNCA on Tuesdays at 9pm and e.tv on Sundays at 10am