We can’t keep doing the same old SOE shuffle
Apparently, there are some among the ruling party faithful who believe that the current SABC board is not the kind they can go with “into an election”. The chair of the board, Bongumusa Makhathini, and his team showed their mettle this week when they faced a barrage of questions from parliamentarians who were outraged about almost everything from sportscaster Robert Marawa’s hefty salary to executive bonuses that were paid last year before this board was even in place.
But the underlying political sub-currency is that the ANC has had enough of the current board and the retrenchment vibe has given it the excuse to get rid of it in the name of saving jobs. The board is not backing down and has asked the government at the highest level to come to the party with R3bn or face the prospect of an SABC that won’t be able to pay salaries in the next two months. Behind the scenes, I understand there is a lot of intimidation of the chair to quit in order for the ANC to install its own yes-man. This is a story to watch closely.
It’s time that we as a society did something different when it comes to state-owned enterprises (SOEs) or simply admit that we have given up on making these entities profitable and efficient. We can’t have both. This is the same narrative with SAA. Three years ago, then minister of finance Pravin Gordhan pronounced in his budget speech that SAA was to look for a strategic equity partner. A few finance ministers down the line, nothing has happened and now SAA is in a worse state, raising doubts that any businessperson would want to buy into the financial shambles. In a situation where management has to go to market to borrow money, you can imagine the disaster of mixed messages from a government that is meant to guarantee support for such borrowing.
Both SAA and the SABC have managements and boards that are made up of savvy businesspeople who now only need proper political support from the shareholder to succeed. Both parastatals are bloated and need bold leadership to right-size them. Secondly, they need to keep politicians out of decisionmaking — as per a court decision of 2016 — because the persistent interference has caused the mess they are in right now. Business leaders like SAA CEO Vuyani Jarana and Makhathini have to either surround themselves with bold teams that can stem the political noise or quit before their reputations are sullied by the bad decision-making that politicians want to continue through these strategic assets. The reality is simple. These SOEs could have been liquidated long ago if they were normal companies. They are not, and that is the reality everyone needs to understand.
The SABC must be defended by all of us from political interference — in this case interference by politicians from all sides who are using the retrenchments as a political football while endangering the long-term sustainability of the corporation. The board must fast-track recovering stolen money as they fight to change the flawed funding model that is essentially an unfunded mandate. We need to watch closely who else will be brought to the board given the known nervousness of the ruling party about the growing independence of the SABC.
The board must forge ahead and correct the bloated structure of the SABC. No organisation needs 400 managers, especially if so many of them were promoted wrongly to those positions. The trick here is to cut the right bits of the business to bring it to size, not to victimise innocent workers whose salaries do not move the needle. This applies to SAA as well. The airline does not need a 13,000 staff complement to operate. This has to be arrested without delay.
The minister of finance must understand that you can’t fix the problem by tweeting about it but by putting heads together to turn SAA into a public-private partnership. The state does not need to own 100% of the airline, and the sooner we internalise this the better.
The state does not need to own 100% of the airline. The sooner we accept this the better
Tabane is an independent political commentator and the author of Let’s Talk Frankly