The SABC boss Hlaudi Motsoeneng told parliament on Tuesday that the SABC is not doing well when it comes to African languages, including Afrikaans, and that the public broadcaster should be doing more local content in other languages.
"Even at the SABC if you look now, I think we are still not doing well when it comes to African languages - including Afrikaans in this case."
"When you look, the majority of our content on the platform is English," the SABC's famously matricless chief operating officer (COO) Hlaudi Motsoeneng told parliament's portfolio committee on communications.
"The way we treat our own African languages when it comes to news, is different the way we treat other languages. So those are the issues that we are dealing with within the organisation."
In October 2015 the SABC finally dropped all other languages besides English and repeats of all of its news bulletins in other languages from its SABC News (DStv 404) channel on MultiChoice's DStv satellite pay-TV platform, turning its news channel into an English language only channel.
The SABC dumped news in other languages from its news channel despite announcing at the launch of the channel that its "unique selling point is SABC News Channel's multilingual programming" and promising that SABC News will deliver news "to audiences in all 11 South African official languages".
"We are also assisting the provinces to come with, to produce local content in their own languages," said Hlaudi Motsoeneng.
