The kindest thing would be to shut the SABC down, sell off the assets and better-known radio brands to private investors, and turn its HQ into a vast museum of incompetence.
Back in 2001, I was writing a reasonably well-established column called Out to Lunch for the Sunday Times, Business Times. I had also, since 1997, contributed to other sections of the newspaper on subjects as diverse as cruise liners, cooking courses in Ravello, banking crises and how to construct the perfect martini. But I had never written about cars and, as far as I could see, nobody else at the Sunday Times was writing about cars. That was very odd because at every other English language newspaper in the world there would have been a long queue of spotty youths begging to become motoring correspondents and offering to work for free in exchange for the privilege of flying in the sharp end of an aircraft to an overseas car launch and driving something they would never be able to afford in several lifetimes. But not at the Sunday Times.
So I approached the then editor of the Lifestyle section and pointed out that car sales were looking good and motor companies were spending a lot on advertising in the print media. Wouldn’t it be fairly good for the Times Media bottom line if we were to attract some of that advertising revenue (or was I completely missing the whole point of running a newspaper?). The reply I got was that the former editor of the ST, the late Ken Owen, didn’t like motoring journalists because he thought they were a bunch of scroungers (one of his more sensible observations) and so had banned them. But Owen had moved on to pastures new, so I asked the Lifestyle editor whether we shouldn’t get a motor journalist in at the ST and he asked whether I wanted to have a bash at it. I did indeed and a monthly column very soon became a long-running weekly column and the advertising revenue started to flow in. I was told (after my sacking in 2008) by an ex member of the advertising team at the ST that my motoring pieces sometimes attracted amounts as high as R1 million a week in motor industry advertising. Let’s assume my informant was just being kind and that the amount was only R250 000. That would still be around R12 million a year that the ST hadn’t had as income before I started writing a motoring column.
The ST motoring column was well-received by readers and I was soon asked to write for other motoring publications and, additionally, I had a regular slot on SAFM every Saturday morning talking about cars. Then, in 2004, I received a phone call from somebody saying they were thinking of pitching to the SABC for a new TV show on cars and wanted me to audition as one of the presenters. I assumed this was a hoax call, but since the audition was just down the road at Zoo Lake I thought I’d look by just in case. And so it was that I auditioned and a few weeks later had a telephone call from the show’s producers saying we had won the contract and that a programme called Car Torque would debut in April 2004; get ready to film next week. The show apparently attracted a viewership of over 500 000, with numbers peaking at 1.2 million if we happened to be on air before a major sporting event. The show ran for over four years and was generally acknowledged to be a vast improvement on previous attempts to broadcast a motoring show.
The relationship with the SABC was very cordial to begin with. They were obviously relieved to finally have a decent motoring show bringing in some advertising revenue. However, after a couple of years and some personnel changes at the SABC, things began to change. A directive came that we needed to include more indigenous languages in the show, which was being broadcast on the English-language SABC3 channel. This caused much mirth initially and I suggested that we just say the letter ‘e’ before everything we were describing, such as e-dashboard, e-windscreen wiper, e-turbo charger and e-pod, but that wasn’t quite what the SABC ‘diversity team’ had in mind. So we re-scripted future programmes to involve a black celebrity who would jabber on in one of the African languages while I nodded sagely in agreement without having a clue what he was saying. Not surprisingly, this affected the smooth flow of the show and added to production costs as well as alienating some of our viewers who weren’t really tuning in to see a politically correct analysis of the new Porsche 911 Turbo.
Things got worse though. The SABC wasn’t paying the production company on time and a new unofficial rule was bought into play by the SABC. When the owners of the production house visited Auckland Park in search of the payment which was now three months in arrears, they wouldn’t be admitted past reception if they had a white skin. So the production company had to hire a black receptionist to go and beg for the outstanding payment. I wish I could tell you that I was making this all up, but the presenters and production team of Car Torque only discovered these things when the programme was nearing the end of its final run with no communication forthcoming as to whether the series would be continued. That’s when we also discovered that the producers of the show had been forced to increase the bond on their property in order to pay us all while the SABC was spitefully withholding their money.
So the rot at the national broadcaster goes back to pre-Hlaudi times and I’m sure there are other production companies who have similar tales to tell. Which is why I would suggest that a R2.1 billion bailout for the SABC (with more to come it seems) is tax money down the drain. If the SABC had a long and distinguished history of commissioning post-1994 docu-dramas or even decent quality light entertainment then there may be a plea in mitigation, but they’ve done none of that. All the SABC has been good for is as a rest home for ANC cadres who might prove even more useless in other jobs. The salary bill is ludicrous and the idea of a turnaround is even more ludicrous. The real issue is this….do we need the SABC? Primedia have neatly slipped into the role of government propagandist at no cost to the taxpayer and we now have a much wider choice of viewing on TV thanks to Netflix and Showmax. The only possible use I could think of for SABC TV is to beam it into prison cells as punishment and it seems that a very high percentage of licence holders would agree with me.
The kindest thing for the taxpayer, the viewer, the listener and even the staff would be to pull the plug on the SABC and to sell off the assets and better-known radio brands to private investors. Then turn the entire SABC HQ into a vast museum of incompetence where, for a small sum, citizens of this beleaguered nation could visit and ponder the thought that the ANC couldn’t even get this one right.
David Bullard is a columnist, author and celebrity public speaker known for his controversial satire.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the IRR.
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