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The Democratic Alliance (DA) disputes the SABC news report that the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Communications at its meeting yesterday 'applauded' the corporation's 'successful turnaround'. There was no such ringing endorsement.

Any impartial journalist covering the presentation on the SABC's progress in implementing the numerous and onerous recommendations in the Auditor General's (AG’s) 2009 report into endemic corruption and mismanagement at the public broadcaster would have published a different story.

The SABC task team was rigorously questioned by members of Parliament about the claims of success made in its presentation and the team’s ability to meet its deadlines in an organisation where corruption, opportunism and a culture of entitlement have run rampant for more than a decade.

Any journalist worth his or her salt would have headlined these challenges, as well as the discrepancies in the task team's success rates as reported in differing versions of the same presentation. These considerable discrepancies implied an intention to deceive the committee.

Last Thursday the committee was sent an advance copy of the slide presentation that was made yesterday. It bore the dual branding of the SABC and the Department of Communications (DoC).

Yesterday a printout of the presentation was given to the committee, with only SABC branding. When challenged on this, the Department of Communications acting deputy director general (finance), Sam Vilakazi, said that task team leader Sully Motsweni had sent him the slides to review. He had advised that the DoC branding be removed as it was an SABC presentation.

DA Deputy Spokesperson on Communications, Butch Steyn, pointed out that there were significant differences in the figures listing the progress made on the AG's recommendations.

For example, progress in implementing conflict of interest processes was stated in the initial SABC/DoC presentation as being at 40%, whereas in the SABC-branded presentation it was given as 75%. This is one of four recommendations where the success rate was revised significantly upwards.

SABC board chairman Dr Ben Ngubane said that, as this was a massive and dynamic turnaround programme being monitored through an online dashboard, the figures were changing all the time and that the presentation the committee received last week contained outdated information.

When questioned on what had occurred during four days to so dramatically ramp up the success rate, the task team could not provide an answer.

This incident, coupled with the SABC's dishonest news reporting, rings alarm bells about the integrity of the organisation, the DoC and the true success rate of the turnaround strategy.