We had to break the rules to keep the SABC alive

The SABC is not only our national public broadcaster, it is also a national keypoint. As such, security at the SABC is an important issue. In many countries, the defence force is responsible for security and it is not unusual to find a military tank parked outside a national broadcaster.

When I was appointed to the interim board of the SABC by president Jacob Zuma in 2017, the corporation was almost on its knees. Our arrival was not short of drama — the then minister of communications, Faith Muthambi, gave us letters in the middle of a session with the parliamentary portfolio committee, effectively booting us out. 

This was despite letters of appointment signed by Zuma. Muthambi said in her letters that we could not start operating until she had issued a concurring letter supporting the president’s. And here is the interesting part: she was not going to do so until we had a full security vetting.

There are two types of security vettings: a desktop one that looks at debts and criminal records, et cetera, which can take a day; or the full blast, which even wants to know if you have had sex with a person of the same sex. This can take a minimum of six months, and up to several years. Our tenure as the interim board was for six months, so effectively our appointment would lapse while we sat at home waiting for Muthambi’s concurrence letter. She just wanted us out.

For whatever reason, Zuma replaced her with Ayanda Dlodlo, who  decided to ask for the desktop version and we were back in business. There was chaos, as became clear during our orientation. Virtually everyone was acting in the senior posts. There was hardly enough money to pay the staff, and as someone who had previously worked there and also as a media person, I was accosted at every turn by staff wanting to know if they would be paid.

When the finance department made its presentation, my heart sank. We owed more than R1bn. But it turned out that even that bleak picture was not a true reflection. The auditor-general told us many invoices were not being loaded; when we asked the divisional finance teams why, we were told this had been an instruction by executives to make the financial picture look less harrowing.

There are legal committees that the board must have. There were only five of us, so we sat on multiple committees and each of us chaired more than one committee. We decided to form a special payments committee, which I chaired, where I would meet every month with the CFO and divisional financial heads to look at how much money was in the kitty, and who could be paid. Salaries were first and then we would have a crying-and-begging session from each divisional head motivating why this or that invoice had to be paid.

Literally, people would cry, because they were at the coalface and were dealing with suppliers of content, equipment, catering and other services that we had used. Now their houses and cars were being repossessed and/or their kids had been thrown out of private schools. It was a harrowing experience every month.

We were at the SABC virtually every day, until late at night, trying to sort out the mess. The capture of supply chain management by Hlaudi Motsoeneng was easy to see; he had moved his personal assistant to head that section. Everything coming from that section was therefore suspect.

But the dice had been cast and we had done it with eyes open. Guilty as charged, My Lady.

It became clear that if we were going to wrest control away from the corrupt, we had to get our own independent financial adviser, who would look at all the figures presented to us before we acted; second, we had to adopt what is known in the tech sector as the disruptive approach.

The latter meant everything is suspicious until it is cleared. And there was good reason for this. We had a company allegedly collecting TV licence fees that was being paid more than it was bringing in. This while the SABC had a TV licence division with about 14 people sitting idle. We cancelled the contract immediately without following the rules. We were taken to court and won. And the internal licence division brought in more than the outsiders. I plead guilty to not following the rules, My Lady.

We had the glaring issue of the Gupta breakfast shows on SABC2, where the Guptas were in charge and pocketed the proceeds. The SABC provided all the technical broadcast equipment, staff and channel time, and, wait for it, received not a cent in return. 

For example the Guptas would decide the next breakfast is in Kimberley. The SABC office in Kimberley cannot do a show of that magnitude, with multiple cameras like in the studio at Auckland Park. So technicians, outside broadcast trucks and a truck carrying a generator would move to Kimberley, most of them a few days beforehand to set up. The personnel would stay in hotels. All paid by the SABC but with the proceeds going to the Guptas.

We cancelled the one-page contract and were taken to court. The Guptas wanted more than R144m as compensation for the one year of the contract that was still to run. That was the first time we had view of how much they were making, as they had refused to tell us what they made per show. I plead guilty to not following the rules, My Lady.

And so, My Lady, this particular member of that interim board pleads guilty as charged, and given half-a-chance, and faced with the same set of facts, would do the same again

Then there was the company that was supposed to do websites for all platforms. We found that the company’s proposal had been drafted on an SABC laptop by the same person who then presented at a meeting where the proposal was adjudicated. There had not been a  request for proposals but the day after its presentation the company was paid R4.5m. When we got there, only one website was functional. We stopped this. Guilty as charged, My Lady.

This is the atmosphere in which we were operating when the security tender that was decided upon by the Gauteng South High Court landed before board. 

A day before it came to the board, a whistleblower spoke to the chair indicating that the security tender was “cooked”. The expiring security tender, under  which Mafoko Security Patrols was providing services, had already been extended several times and had now reached the point at which it could not legally be extended further.

The last extension was expiring on the day the board looked at the tender. In other words, we had to make a decision that day or the next day national keypoint would not have security. We couldn’t postpone the decision, and given our disruptive approach and the whistleblower, we knew that a tender for more than R180m  couldn’t be clean.

We asked the head of legal whether our reasons met the criteria for validity,  and were told, in typical lawyer fashion, that in his opinion they did. That was good enough for us. We asked whether the discussions we had had met the threshold for “applying our minds”. Again, in his opinion, they did. We took our decision. 

A member of supply chain management (SCM) spoke up to say what we were doing was wrong. She  even asked someone from the Treasury for an opinion and whoever it was sided with her. But in our opinion she was from SCM and her stance was for us, further proof that someone wanted Mjayeli Security Services in, by any means necessary. 

It didn’t matter to us. We had found a way to disrupt. All this is in the board minutes.

It didn’t take long before our chair started getting calls even from parliament asking why we wanted to get the ANC in trouble with this decision. When she discussed this with me we were both flabbergasted as to how it involved the ANC or could damage the party.  But the dice had been cast and we had done it with eyes open. Guilty as charged, My Lady.

And as the judge in the matter concluded, we were technically in the wrong.  But for my part, I am prepared to plead guilty as charged because following the technically correct route would have meant continuing with corruption.

We asked the Special Investigating Unit to come in and investigate a number of procurements, including this one. The SIU felt our decision was so egregious as to warrant a recommendation that we be declared delinquent, and therefore not fit to sit on any board. 

And so, My Lady, this particular member of that interim board pleads guilty as charged, and given half-a-chance, and faced with the same set of facts, would do the same again — because the cumulative effect of the disruptive approach we took is the reason we still have an SABC today. 

* Tsedu was a member of the former interim board of the SABC