Let’s hear it for SABC management

Hands up who thought I was being sarcastic. Sorry to disappoint. Eddie Funde and Dali Mpofu, respectively chairman and CEO of the South African public broadcaster, are right on the money with their latest statements.

According to Computing SA, they’re calling for more public funding for the SABC, and less reliance on commercial revenue.

“It is very unusual for the public broadcaster to be 80% commercially funded,” Funde says. “It is very hard for the public broadcaster to fulfil its mandate and at the same time have to go around and looking for money. We are working very hard to change that situation.”

If you’re going to have a state-owned public broadcaster (the value of which is an entirely different argument), it should be funded not from advertising revenue, but from tax. The problem with permitting the SABC to sell advertising is that it drains a great deal of potential revenue from commercial broadcasters. This makes it hard for them to compete, which results in a perceived market failure, which in turn causes a slow, steady expansion of the SABC’s presumed mandate.

I don’t see the value in a public broadcaster that shows bargain-bin movies, American soap operas and late-night sleaze. What possible public purpose does that serve? Public broadcasting should be educational. It should promote the arts. It should give a leg-up to local productions. It should screen stuff that isn’t commercially viable for private broadcasters. That means that it shouldn’t contribute to making things commercially non-viable by leeching advertising revenue out of the private sector.

That, in turn, means it should be entirely funded by public money. And since TV licence fees are inherently regressive, not to mention expensive to administer, this means funding it from the tax coffers. This change will narrow its mandate and focus its efforts. It will curb scope creep. Instead of dragging down the aggregate quality of South African television, it might even raise the overall standard.

It’s not the only change I’d like to see in the broadcast sector. Issuing broadcast licences to all qualifying applicants, regardless of whether they compete with the SABC’s free-to-air model, instead of artificially limiting their number according to what the government guesses the market will bear, would be another. But funding the SABC from taxes alone would be a great leap forward. If you’ll excuse the expression.