R2K welcomes SCA ruling against disgraced Hlaudi & condemns ongoing intimidation of journalists!
The Right2Know Campaign welcomes the latest in a never-ending series of court victories against SABC COO Hlaudi Motsoeneng and his cabal. The Supreme Court of Appeal has dismissed Hlaudi’s application for leave to appeal a High Court ruling that set aside his permanent appointment to the position of COO. Time and again Hlaudi has been found to have no leg to stand on in court. The Public Protector found that he was unfit for his position after he lied about his CV, purged staff, massively inflated his own salary and irregularly raised the salaries of his cronies at the public broadcaster. The courts have vindicated these findings.
It is now time for Hlaudi to give up. He must not seek reappointment and he must not take this to the Constitutional Court and continue doing what he has always done – buy time by dragging out legal processes using public money. There is practically no chance that the Constitutional Court will rule in favour of Hlaudi and the financially crippled SABC can ill afford to bankroll his hopeless legal battles. His incompetence, his misconduct and his inability to run a major public institution have become even more glaringly obvious since the 2014 report of the PP. Since then we have seen the most egregious cases of financial mismanagement, victimisation of staff, political interference and censorship in the life of the post-1994 SABC.
It is clear though that Motsoeneng does not account to us but rather to his backers in the ANC, for whom he remains a useful tool in crippling yet another key public institution. The current spat with Motsoeneng has taken on a new dimension now with reports that two of the eight SABC journalists who were suspended have received numerous threats over the past few weeks for refusing to censor their content. Law enforcement seems to know who the individuals issuing these threats are. We demand that immediate action is taken against them and safeguards put in place to ensure that no journalist should fear for her life simply for doing her job. All of us must stand up to defend their rights: politicians who defend freedom of expression, unions whose duty it is to uphold workers’ rights against intimidation and harassment, and ordinary South Africans whom the “SABC eight” have served with fearlessness and integrity.
By keeping Motsoeneng in place – in any capacity – the corrupt SABC board and the captured minister to whom they account, insult the freedoms so many sacrificed so much for. A key pillar of our democracy is the right to freedom of expression. An independent public broadcaster that helps espouse the ideals, values and cultural diversity of South Africa’s people is absolutely vital to that.
In an accountable democracy Hlaudi would not have lasted a day in his current position. He must know that he is living on borrowed time and he should spare the public from having to continue demanding his resignation. But we must also be aware that Hlaudi is only the symptom of a wider malaise that has seen a faction of the political-business elite actively undermine key institutions of accountability and oversight bodies while capturing state-owned enterprises and turning them into patronage machines. The SABC is a critical link in the bigger picture of state capture. It plays a dual function of patronage and control, as a source of personal enrichment for cronies and a means of airbrushing the media narrative and putting a positive spin on an ugly reality.
If the problems at the SABC are to be seriously addressed then we need more than just the removal of another Zuma appointee. ANC MPs in the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Communications betrayed the public and failed to hold the SABC to account, and they must now be held to account for it. We need to see Minister Faith Muthambi and the entire Board pack their bags too. As a first step the Board should be re-appointed through an open, transparent and democratic process, the status of the Broadcasting Act vis-a-vis the Companies Act should be reaffirmed, the Minister should not have the power to appoint the execs, and good governance structures should be put in place at the SABC. Anything short of that will leave the door open for this crisis to repeat itself.
