Candidates grilled about SABC retrenchments

The retrenchment of SABC employees loomed large over the first two days of interviews for the broadcaster’s new board.

MPs grilled candidates about the broadcaster’s decision to lay off staff last year, while seeking to hammer the outgoing board and SABC management for the layoffs, especially as the broadcaster is in the process of recruiting staff to fill vacant positions.

DA MP Dianne Kohler Barnard spoke of the “heartbreak” of seeing people who had spent years at the broadcaster being “simply turned away”. She suggested the SABC had a skills deficit due to the retrenchments, which EFF MP Vuyani Pambo described as “bad decision-making”.

“Please comment on the axing of so much expertise, with 600 staff laid off or forced out through changes in their job description, and the hiring of over 400 people to pull in more relevant expertise.

“It seems the massive lack of skills has exacerbated the lack of content and dropping listener and viewership levels,” Kohler Barnard suggested to one candidate on Tuesday.

Pambo bashed the SABC leadership for the 621 retrenchments, saying the SABC had “admitted it got rid of people with skills and now it was rehiring”.

“This speaks to bad decision-making,” he said while soliciting board candidate Mpho Tsedu’s views on the matter. “We said we are balancing the salary bill, but look at where we are now,” he added and asked Tsedu whether the incoming board shouldn’t be zooming in on that decision taken by its predecessors.

The SABC concluded the so-called section 189 process in March 2021 with 621 employees leaving the broadcaster — 275 of them because their positions had become redundant and 346 opting for voluntary severance packages.

Section 189 of the Labour Relations Act deals with retrenchments.

“Some were concerned about the impact of lower job scale codes resulting from the organisation-wide job evaluation process, on current salaries and their pension,” the SABC said at the time it concluded the process.

Almost 18 months later, even board members are still at odds as to whether this was the way to go.

Board deputy chair Mamodupi Mohlala-Muladzi, who is seeking a second term and who spoke out against retrenchments in 2020, told MPs she felt vindicated.

“You will note that I have in the past been very vocal around the issue of section 189. I still feel very strongly that our turnaround strategy would have been better implemented, would have been more successful and we would have been able to achieve greater milestones had section 189 not taken place because I do believe that yes, we may have shown a saving but when we go into the digital age, we are still going to need more staff,” she said on Tuesday.

“I think history has proved me correct because after section 189 where 651 staff were laid off, we then still again had to advertise to get people to come into the system.”

Her board colleague David Maimela disagreed. He reminded MPs a headcount reduction was a requirement imposed on the SABC by the National Treasury if the broadcaster was to get a government bailout in 2019.

Maimela explained the SABC salary bill was one of the key cost drivers with about 43% of total expenditure per annum going to salaries.

“It was unsustainable and when you looked at some of the positions, they landed  themselves with redundancy, duplication, [a] very cumbersome structure with many layers of management,” he said.

Maimela acknowledged the decision was difficult, but the SABC had found other mechanisms to save money and in the end did not retrench the 621 initially expected would be retrenched.

He indicated the move to the digital era will possibly translate into more people losing their jobs.

While MPs have been critical of the SABC leadership for the retrenchments, the reduction of staff numbers was one of the conditions imposed on the organisation by the government to attain the bailout it received in 2019.

The SABC needed to reduce its salary costs by R700m, parliament heard at the time.

In November 2020, SABC group CEO Madoda Mxakwe told the Sunday Times the broadcaster had no option but to retrench for its own survival.

Mxakwe cited years of extravagant bonuses and salary increases, along with a bloated staff complement, as having brought the SABC to that point.

“It's a difficult process to go through, but the alternative is really literally the collapse of this institution,” he told the Sunday Times at the time.

Apart from the layoffs, the SABC froze salary increases for three years, reduced leave entitlement from 35 days to 28, cut sick leave from 30 days a year to 36 days over three years, and discontinued the encashment of leave days, which Mxakwe described as a costs “monster”.

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