5 August 2019

If the SABC is forced, via the Premier Soccer League’s (PSL’s) exclusive television broadcast rights deal with MultiChoice, to pay MultiChoice R280-million for a period of five years in return for a pittance annual revenue of R9.8-million, the SABC will lose the difference, a monumental R231-million. Who will pay for the SABC loss, a gain for MultiChoice, a subsidiary of Naspers, formerly the mouthpiece of the Broederbond, the ideological vanguard of apartheid?

To understand the answer, we need to appreciate that, at present the SABC is in need of R1.3-billion, and has asked for a state guarantee. State revenue is derived from public resources, in the form among others of taxes. The destruction of the SABC, like other public entities, has occurred in various ways. One of these is to run them down through dealings that favour private profit making interests and plunge them into the crises of revenue and losses. It is absolute bad governance to spend money in return for material losses amounting to structural destruction of public entities.

The PSL and the ministers of communications, sports, arts and culture, as well as the SABC, should meet as a matter of urgency to resolve the impasse in a manner that will help the SABC to avoid loss altogether, appreciating that the SABC is in need of revenue in order to look after the jobs and plight of its entire workforce and in this instance the workers it has employed to deliver television sport broadcasting.

The public should be entitled access to the PSL matches and broadcast of other sport of national interest through free-to-air television, of which public broadcasting is instrumental.

The government has to urgently look into the problem of the negative impact of sport commodification on the fundamental necessity of asserting public interests.

Equally important, PSL players must be paid decent wages to look after their needs and families.

These issues must find profound expression in the way forward that is urgently required.

ISSUED BY THE SOUTH AFRICAN COMMUNIST PARTY | SACP

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