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The Minister of Communications, Ms Dina Pule, and her Deputy Minister, Ms Stella TembisaNdabeni, met with the Portfolio Committee on Communications on 22 November 2011 for the first time since their appointments. The purpose of the meeting was to brief the Committee on progress at the SABC.
Minister Pule’s submission contained feedback on the guarantee provided by theGovernment to the SABC in 2009 to secure a term loan from Nedbank. The loan was intended to relieve the financial crisis at the SABC. This guarantee was provided on the basis of commitments made by the SABC that it would develop and implement a turnaround plan.
The SABC’s ability to repay these funds is dependent on the successful execution of this turnaround plan. Accordingly, the Department of Communications and National Treasury established a monitoring task team to monitor SABC’s progress in meeting the strategy’s deliverables and to track its financial position in this regard.
The Minister’s briefing on the current status of the SABC to the Portfolio Committee contained the following main points:
· Governance. While the elements of the turnaround strategy are in place, they are not integrated into a single document that would govern all turnaround activities.
· Shareholders’ compact. The shareholders’ compact for the 2011-12 financialyear has not been concluded.
· Revised guarantee targets. The SABC has submitted a proposal requesting that the original targets for the government guarantee be revised.
· Leadership. Key executive positions (Group CEO, CFO and COO) are still vacant, posing amanagement challenge.
· Operational inefficiencies. Concerns relating to operational inefficiency need to beaddressed by the SABC management urgently.
· Monitoring task team. The monitoring task team has experienced challenges in terms of capacity and consistency of membership.
To address these challenges, the Minister has recently taken the following important decisions:
· The SABC Turnaround Plan must be integrated and finalised by January 2012.
· The shareholders’ compact for the 2011-2012 financial year must be finalized by December 2011.
· The SABC should expedite the filling of the vacant executive positions.
· The capacity of the monitoring task team will be enhanced by December 2011 to ensure effective monitoring of the SABC Turnaround Plan.
The Minister further advised that she is currently studying the business case that underpins the request to revise the targets for the government guarantee, and will then make a decision.
Lastly, the Minister has established a “war room” within the Department of Communications to develop of set of recommendations that will address the governance and other challenges facing the SABC.
In view of these developments, Minister Pule requested the Portfolio Committee on Communications to grant the Department and the Ministry extra time to address the issues raised above before presenting the performance of the SABC to Committee. The Minister indicated that she had prioritised the SABC, and that she should be ready to provide the Committee with a comprehensive status report on the SABC’s performance in the fourth quarter of the current financial year.