Not in years, if ever, has the SABC - always an institutionalised broadcasting hotbed for histrionic powerbrokers and sycophantic corporate ladder climbers - seen a chief operating officer (COO), an acting chief operating officer, be so much on the forefront and greedily lapping up the limelight as the front footed Hlaudi Motsoeneng.
Industry insiders in South Africa's TV industry are buzzing about the way in which Hlaudi Motsoeneng constantly - as yet again with the latest eye-popping unbelievable order to can newspaper analysts from an SABC talk show - constantly turns up smack front and centre in each and every scandalous SABC furore.
Hlaudi Motsoeneng seems to like being in the camera spotlight and doesn't appear afraid or ashamed to show it.
Besides being the SABC's highest ranking executives without having passed grade 12 and no prior high-level executive experience, these days Hlaudi Motsoeneng appears to be wherever the action is. That is, of course, the work of the COO. What is not quite so mandated is the multiple televangelistic appearances (and some of them quite embarrassing and cringe-worthy ones) which could just as easily go to other high ranking SABC executive players.
These days as sure as neverending backstage drama plays out behind-the-scenes at the beleaguered and scandal-ridden public broadcaster, one can almost count on Hlaudi Motsoeneng (instead of the more sanguinely intoned CEO Lulama Mokhobo) to pop up and make an appearance in front of it.
Hlaudi Motsoeneng first joined the SABC in 1990 as a freelance journalist and was appointed as a trainee journalist in early 1995. Hlaudi Motsoeneng who left the SABC in 2007 after an internal investigation, was reappointed in 2011. Over the course of a year since then, he was rapidly promoted three times. He was appointed acting chief operating officer at the SABC after a special board meeting in November 2011 despite having had no prior high-level executive experience.
This year Hlaudi Motsoeneng, like a moth deliciously stretching in the first delicate rays after bursting out of its cocoon as a pupa, seemed to basked in the glow on SABC TV screens, constantly making press appearance ready showings to say a few words. (He was oddly absent from the press conference earlier this year where the SABC said that the SABC actually knew he doesn't have matric).
Never before has a SABC COO - let alone an acting COO without a matric qualification or any real broadcasting experience been so willing; and seemed so eager; to trot out in front of the cameras to be the one delivering the corporation's soundbyte.
Not even Daniel Clamp, the New York media mogul made as many TV appearances on his own TV channel, the Clamp News Network when the Gremlins attacked at took over Clamp Center in 1990.
In just this year Hlaudi Motsoeneng, a top supporter of president Jacob Zuma, showed up on South African television screens ranging across a diverse range of amazing TV scenes.
Besides multiple press conferences and even showing up at Riaan Cruywagen's recent farewell brunch, South Africa's TV industry saw Hlaudi Motsoeneng pop up from scenes such as when smoke billowed out behind him at a SABC on fire as the Isidingo set went up in flames at Henley Studios to tell the nation that "I mean, financially, we are not sound" and that the SABC "we don't know how to handle it"- to even the 2012 Sport Awards where he was inexplicably a presenter of one of the categories and stared straight ahead of him, coming across as trying to make out the words in front of him.
From multiple parliamentary appearances to brief the government on the inner quagmires besetting the SABC, to the latest fiasco involving dumped analysts for a media roundtable discussion on radio simply because the ANC was not also invited, it seems predestined that Hlaudi Motsoeneng will be seen and will be weighing in with a Doolittle-esque non sequitur.
The over-inflated, ego-rapacious Daniel Clamp would have been proud.
