The draft SABC Bill has drawn howls of condemnation from industry experts, who say it is merely a rehash of existing broadcasting legislation that achieves little to help the ailing public broadcaster.

The bill, approved by cabinet last week and introduced in parliament on 2 October, continues to propose that the SABC should be funded from advertising, subscriptions, sponsorships, licence fees, government, donations or “any other amounts to which the corporation may become entitled”.

There is no policy change here – and up until now this has not helped to make the public broadcaster solvent.

Head of the Gibs Media Leadership Think Tank, and a former SABC board member, Michael Markovitz described the bill as “very disappointing”.

“It is well known that the global online and mobile phone explosion fundamentally disrupted the print media and broadcasting industries as they existed at the turn of the century. Yet, in the face of these existential technology and market disruptions, the public broadcaster has been expected to survive without any changes to its funding model for 24 years,” Markovitz said.

There are three fundamental flaws with the bill, he said. The first is that it is being tabled in a policy vacuum. “It is simply unworkable to table a bill dealing with the SABC before the general industry policy on audio and audio-visual content services has been finalised. Secondly, the finalisation of the SABC’s funding model has not been treated with any urgency in the bill.

Draft SABC Bill ‘beggars belief’

“Given the SABC’s perilous financial situation, government’s decision to allow the minister to take three years to determine a funding framework beggars belief. Many interested parties have made submissions to government on a proposed new funding model itself, including scrapping the existing TV licence fee and legislating new collection measures for a public media levy. None of these submissions has been taken into account. Government has just kicked for touch,” Markovitz said.

He said the third fundamental flaw is the proposal to establish a commercial board (in addition to the main board). “If government wants more time to finalise a funding model, why is it recommending a restructuring of SABC’s commercial services under a commercial board before a funding model had been decided?” he asked.

The corporation has been tasked with providing two separate operational services: a public service audio and audio-visual content media service, and a commercial subsidiary to be separately administered with a separate set of financial records and accounts.

Read: SABC TV licences to stay – for now

The commercial service will be subject to the same policy and regulatory structures for commercial broadcasting as outlined in the Electronic Communications Act and must comply with the democratic values of the country in the provision of programmes.

But the really egregious feature of the bill is that it fails to consider the crisis in which the SABC finds itself, according to Media Monitoring Africa director William Bird.

“It’s not as if they’re creating any new content, they’re losing viewers and yet this is all they can produce,” he told TechCentral. “As far as their funding is concerned, by their own admission their model has never worked and yet they’re just trotting it out again.

“Either it’s incompetence at a staggering level, or just a plain refusal to accede to any requests, or a more sinister motive: that they’re seeking to gain control of commercial assets. There really is no rational reason why the same financial decisions would be made that we know don’t work.”

Bird said there seemed to be no incentive to fund the SABC. “There’s no plan, no thought of ‘this is how we’re going to do it’, and it defies logic unless there are some non-public interest ends at play.”

He said the bill made him think of the movie Blast from the Past, in which a naive man comes out into the world after spending 35 years in a nuclear fallout shelter and acts as if nothing in the world had changed. “There is almost no reference to digital changes in the bill – it’s unspeakably outdated,” he said.

SABC TV licences to stay – for now

The bill also gives more power to the minister of communications to veto board decisions.

Bird said ministerial interference is a common thread running through the demise of most state-owned enterprises – Eskom and the Post Office, for instance – but that it almost seemed as if the draft bill was making up for lost time in the case of the SABC, which under the previous board had not been in the news for theft, corruption or grand-scale governance issues.

“The bill makes provision for a CEO who is editor-in-chief, and a board, but then gives the minister huge powers of veto as well as the right to launch investigations if there is ‘mismanagement’. So there is scope there for plenty of interference in the SABC in terms of these conditions,” he said. – © 2023 NewsCentral Media