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Who's running the show?
10/06/2008 08:32 - (SA)
Chris Moerdyk
If it wasn't bad enough that SAA begs government for billions of our tax money to bail it out every few years, we now have the SABC whining to parliament about a R2bn shortfall over the next three years.
Frankly, I have had it with these state-owned charity cases that not only provide us with sub-standard service but that keep demanding a billion here and a billion there because they simply can't compete with businesslike commercial airlines and broadcasters who all seem to make a quite healthy profit.
With interest rates going up faster than a Mars probe and times getting so tough the average consumers are coming out of supermarkets and petrol stations feeling like they have just gone five rounds with Mike Tyson in a nasty mood, can we really afford to keep bailing these useless parastatals out all the time?
Surely the time has come that even organisations like Cosatu that fight against privatisation to save jobs, can see that the way SAA and the SABC have been behaving a lot more jobs have already been lost than would have been the case if they'd had been privatised and let people who actually understand business to run the show.
No clue
The SABC's problem is not simply that its management doesn't seem to have a clue about how to run a business but they are so busy brown-nosing government that they keep promising things to their political bosses than are not only difficult to achieve but extremely expensive.
For example, the politicians insist that the SABC has to be a medium of information - that it has to educate the masses. That's horrendously expensive. And pretty stupid seeing that research has shown that what the masses actually want is to be mostly entertained and occasionally informed.
Then, the SABC has this ludicrous local content ideal. Now, there's nothing wrong with promoting local content but it is madness to create very, very expensive local content that can only be used by the SABC because of language and culture and then simply thrown away.
What needs to happen is that our local content should be produced in such a way that it can be marketed and sold overseas in an effort to get at least some of the money back. The way the SABC is going right now is like buying an expensive cell phone, using it once, throwing it away and then buying another one to make another phone call.
It is now about time that government and the SABC got together and put aide their ridiculous daydreams and got someone who actually understands broadcasting to explain to them how things work in the real world.
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