Fat cats milking SABC, SAA

Two state-owned entities, SAA and the SABC, have been in the spotlight. About once a year the former appears before the public enterprises portfolio committee and whoever is the chief executive, chairperson or chief financial officer at the time tells MPs that this time the turnaround strategy is way down the track and they will not be asking for more bailouts or guarantees from the government. They apologise for the poor track record of their predecessors, but argue they weren’t part of the organisation at the time of all the misdemeanours. To their credit virtually the entire SAA board resigned after it became clear that they were not much liked by the Public Enterprises Minister, Malusi Gigaba, who described their departure as “bizarre”.

This week, the SABC appeared before the communications portfolio committee. Notably its 2011/12 annual report, tabled in Parliament recently, makes no mention of the probe by the Special Investigating Unit (SIU) into various alleged misdemeanours, including the R326 million digital migration contract that went to Siemens. One would not ever imagine that there was even a whiff of scandal over this matter as the annual report waxes lyrical about the migration project. It describes it as such: “The process of migrating all SABC workflows to the digital domain continued in line with the long-term migration strategy envisaged since 2005.”

In the directors’ report it carries a section on the latest “turnaround strategy”. It says that during the year under review the corporation began “to embed the implementation of the turnaround strategy”, the vision for the SABC that “seeks to improve functional efficiencies and optimal performance”. It was “predicated” on seven pillars, including – believe it or not – “putting broadcasting and broadcasters back at the centre of the business and editorial integrity back into the SABC’s platforms and programmes, in particular news”. The seventh pillar was “managing and reporting on strategy development and implementation, operational performance and risk management”.

The relatively new company secretary, Theresa Geldenhuys, explained that the reports of the auditor-general and the SIU were not ready for inclusion in the annual report. Thus no whiffs of scandal are to be found. She also went to great lengths to point out that all the allegations against the SABC could not be associated with the current board as it was pulling out all the stops to ensure a corruption-free environment prevailed at the state broadcaster. She pointed out that the alleged scandals occurred between 2005 and 2010, before the new board took office. Some would say South Africa doesn’t need a mafia to train new gangsters, we have a fertile training ground at the SABC.

At SAA, the chief executives have been paid such enormous salaries, bonuses and perks during the so-called democratic era that you wouldn’t think that for most of that time the airline had run at a loss. Among the damning findings of the auditor-general’s investigation was that senior managers at the SABC notched up millions of rand of misuse of SABC petrol cards. Evidently some of them were lining up all their families’ vehicles at the pumps and covering thousands of kilometres every month. Limits have now been placed on the petrol cards, but there is little evidence of any action against anyone for that particular transgression. Despite all the hot air about how much things have changed at the SABC and SAA, one suspects they are just digging deeper into the pit.