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Reports today indicate that staff at the SABC have spent R20 million on buying 86 luxury cars, despite a moratorium on such expenditure being in place while a new tender process was underway. Such spending constitutes a serious breach of the Public Financial Management Act to which the SABC, as a public entity, must comply.

I will today be writing to the Auditor General to request that a special audit is conducted into the purchase of these cars, in line with Section 3 of the Public Audit Act.

I will also be writing to the Chairperson of the Communications Portfolio Committee to ask that the SABC’s acting CEO, and the broadcaster’s accounting officer, be summoned before the Committee to account for this abuse of public money.

The SABC is funded by the state, and is therefore answerable to the South African people. Its leadership must account to Parliament about its failure to manage its funds appropriately, and the steps it plans to take to ensure such splurges don’t take place in the future.

The SABC says it cannot afford the full cost of digital migration, and expects the poor to bear the burden of a R700 fee to access digital television. This spending on luxury cars shows it has its priorities all wrong. Instead, this money should be spent on subsidizing the cost of new digital decoders for the poor.

This debacle typifies the collapse of the SABC under acting CEO Phil Molefe. Abuse of state resources such as this cannot be allowed to continue.