SABC staffers are beginning to make the Great Trek out of the corporation in their droves in a clear message to COO Hlaudi Motsoeneng that he is making a mess of his job there.
Motsoeneng is a man who seems to find pleasure in controversies and also treasures them. Recently he ordered all SABC staffers, from cleaners and sweepers to office workers, journalists and top management to toe the line or vamoose.
And vamoose is what they have started doing, with the departure of acting CEO and news head Jimi Matthews who, in his parting shot, told Hlaudi that he was nothing but a despot running the SABC as if it’s his own household. Motsoeneng has turned the clock at the SABC backwards, back to the dark days of apartheid when the corporation was nothing but a State propaganda machine. He is turning the SABC back into what the National Party had done since 1948.
Today, the SABC is dancing to the ANC’s tune, and Motsoeneng, himself, is a puppet on its master’s strings. The master in this whole puppet show is the ANC under the leadership of the less-than-honourable President Jacob Zuma.
The ANC hoodwinked the South African public at the dawn of democracy by devising this cleverly crafted time allocation on SABC, in the same fashion as they did in Parliament where you get time to speak according to the number of your MPs in the house.
The more MPs you have, the more time you will speak, and the fewer you have, the less time you get.
For argument’s sake, if you have one MP, then the time you are allocated is not even enough to allow you to open your mouth to speak. So, small parties like the PAC ended up only with gaping mouths in Parliament, as their time allocation elapsed before they could even utter a word.
What a clever way to muzzle the opposition and what a clever way to muzzle the SABC.
The ANC clearly subscribes to the notion that small parties, like children, should be seen and not heard and we all sheepishly go along this.
Why can’t people be allowed to freely air their views and speak their mind without time constraints?
Before I forget, as my parting shot, I want to point out an anomaly on the power relations in the SABC.
Motsoeneng is COO and Matthews was CEO, now who has more clout here – who has more power under normal circumstances, the CEO or COO? Who answers to who? And who’s fooling who? Someone must be playing hide-and-seek here.
