As alarmed and despairing SABC journalists and staff try to rally their resistance to looming retrenchments, I’ve seen some less than supportive commentary on social media.
Some has politely expressed the view that certain chickens are finally coming home to roost, but most seems to have revelled in schadenfreude or even nihilism. In these comments the subtext is clear: just burn it all down.
This attitude is, I suspect, a hangover from the days of Snuki Zikalala and Hlaudi Motsoeneng, when the national broadcaster was synonymous with deep systemic dysfunction and a debased brand of lickspittle journalism.
The state of the country’s other SOEs won’t have helped this view, either. For South Africans numbed by the relentlessness of the rot, it might feel reasonable to believe that the SABC is also staffed exclusively by helpless idiots and cynical sponges.
This, however, is slightly unfair. The SABC is a heaving, hot mess, but it is a hot mess trying to heave itself, in tiny increments, towards something better. Which makes the current crisis, and the crude approach of retrenching 400 staffers, a disaster for three reasons.
The first is that, for all our jokes and eye-rolling, we need a strong, functioning SABC.
For all our jokes and eye-rolling, we need a strong, functioning SABC.
It has become popular among some in the middle class to wonder why the SABC still exists, but such is the privileged isolation of having Netflix and DStv bombard you with content in your own language. It is easy to forget that 12 million people rely on Ukhozi FM and UMhlobo Wenene FM for companionship and consolation, information and entertainment. Radio is a huge and essential medium in this country, and weakening it even slightly will take away something very precious from a very large section of the population.
The second reason is the problem of what will inevitably fill the void left by a collapsing SABC.
State broadcasters often give ruling parties too much airtime while they subtly (or not so subtly) censor opponents, but in general they don’t relentlessly present fiction as fact. The Fox News model, on the other hand, has shown would-be media owners that if you can erase the lines between news, opinion and entertainment, and weaponise humans’ inherent biases and baser tendencies, you can print your own money.
If the SABC surrenders this terrain to private, voraciously for-profit media companies, we will quickly see a kind of shouty arms race in media in this country, in which news about unsensational realities or complex issues is discarded and the spotlight is turned exclusively onto those beliefs, opinions — or outright fictions — that generate the most heat.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly for the long term, the proposed cost-saving purge at the SABC is targeting the wrong people.
It is no secret that the broadcaster is bloated and inefficient, and that its considerable fat must be trimmed. But it is absurd to be going after newsrooms when, in 2018, it was revealed that the then CEO, COO and CFO of the SABC were being paid a combined R12m for, as it turns out, running the sort of company which produces R500m losses and then decides to fire the only essential workers in the building.
In short, it is supremely disingenuous to pretend that the SABC’s problem is 400 mid-level employees when the real problem is a communications ministry that doesn’t have a plan, because it doesn’t have the intellectual or professional capacity to develop one, and also doesn’t have the political permission to appoint people who do.
And so it comes down to this, as it always does in the ANC’s SA: ordinary citizens steeling themselves for unemployment as the minister in charge expresses concern and regret, and wonders if, maybe, someone should do something, before sliding away in a vast shiny car to go and talk about the Fourth Industrial Revolution over yet another free lunch.
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