A farm in Limpopo, a flat in London, an apartment block in Cape Town, flats in Mafikeng and homes in Tshwane townships. These are all part of a bizarre property portfolio that the SABC is trying to offload.
The SABC has received R2.1bn of a R3.2bn bailout from the government. It received the money two weeks ago after months of delay while fine-tuning its turnaround strategy.
Part of the conditions set by the National Treasury before the bailout could be granted was for the public broadcaster to dispose of its vast property portfolio, which has an estimated value of R75m, and is spread across SA and in London. A flat in New Malden, a suburb in southwest London, was recently sold for £880,000 (R16.7m).
SABC CEO Madoda Mxakwe said the flat was bought to house foreign correspondents when the SABC still had a bureau in the British capital.“We have just sold a flat in London. The reason why we had a London property is we used to have all of these news bureaus around the world.”
Asked how it was sold and to whom, the SABC declined to comment, saying the information was confidential. It also refused, for “strategic reasons”, to give the value of all its properties. It is not clear why the SABC needed a farm. The farm is in Tweefontein, near Polokwane. The SABC was coy about why it had bought the farm.
“At the time of purchase, the SABC felt that it needed this property. This is one of the things which the public broadcaster is looking at, in terms of whether we need a particular property and what value it is bringing to the SABC,” the SABC said in response to questions from the Sunday Times. The SABC also owns Rocklands Villas, a Cape Town apartment block that has been the subject of controversy.
Situated behind the SABC studios in Sea Point, it has been vacant for about 20 years and has often been occupied by homeless people. The apartments used to house SABC employees at favourable monthly rents, but were left in a dilapidated state when staff were instructed to vacate the building in the late ’90s. Pressure groups have been campaigning for the building to be converted into affordable housing for working-class families.
Mxakwe said the SABC had received good offers for the farm and Rocklands Villas, but refused to disclose the amounts.“People have been making offers. An offer was made for the Cape Town property, it’s good money. Even the farm in Limpopo.”
He said some of the properties had been bought as a form of investment at a time when the SABC believed it needed alternative income streams.“These are properties that were bought from an investment point of view that we think we can now dispose of. At the time it made business sense to invest in these properties,” he said.
The SABC also inherited properties from the now defunct Bophuthatswana Broadcasting Corporation, which it took over after 1994. These include houses and flats in Mafikeng in the North West, and houses in Mapobane and Garankuwa, situated north of Tshwane.
The SABC said the properties were either being rented to staff members or “other external parties” and it was receiving monthly rental income for them. Mxakwe said the SABC had just concluded the process of identifying all the residential properties owned by the broadcaster and now had a clearer idea of which properties to sell.
“We have done an inventory,” he said. “We have done an evaluation of those and we now have a strategy from a property point of view that can determine which ones we need to sell.”
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