Stella Ndabeni-Abrahams, the minister of communications, revealed this week in a written reply to the Democratic Alliance (DA) political party's member of parliament George Michalakis, that the beleaguered South African public broadcaster that is on the brink of financial collapse, owes South African artists almost R250 million for playing and using their music without paying.
Since music rights organisations are not getting paid by the SABC for the use of performers' songs and music which the SABC continues to use on a daily basis, these organisations are unable to pay over royalties to performers for their work and who are suffering because of the lack and drop in income.
The SABC owes a mounting R126 million to the South African Music Rights Organisation (Samro) alone.
The SABC owes the South African Music Performance Rights Organisation R104 million.
Then there is an R8.8 million the SABC owes to the Association of Independent Record Companies and R3.3 million the SABC owes to the Recording Industry of South Africa.
The SABC owes another R6 million to the Composers, Authors and Publishers Association.
Yolande van Biljon, the SABC's chief financial officer (CFO), told parliament this week that "we owe about R943 million as at the end of February to trade and other payables, so what we are unable to settle really just gets added to the backlog and aggravates the situation as we near the year-end."
"We really rely very heavily on our stakeholders and content providers and other service providers to continue to support us at this point in time."
"In the 11 months as we're reporting here for January we have actively chosen not to spend on certain items - maintenance, travelling, consultants - even our content, in order to ensure that we have sufficient cash to cover our payroll."
Yolande van Biljon told parliament that "our cash-management these days is literally on a day-to-day basis. We prioritise our payroll at the cost of every other service provider, supplier and the investment in content and marketing but we will do everything possible to protect the payroll."
"In February the income was the lowest it has been this whole year but we were able to cover our payroll and we covered really very, very critical service providers only, and that process continues into March."
"So we really just manage around Day Zero. In my opinion, it could really happen any day because it depends on one of our major creditors deciding that they're no longer able to support us," said Yolande van Biljon.
Stella Ndabeni-Abrahams said the government will provide "interim relief" to the SABC to ensure that the ailing public broadcaster is able to pay staff salaries at the end of this month when the SABC reaches factual insolvency.
The SABC needs R6.8 billion as a government bailout in the form of another government-guaranteed bank loan but hasn't received any cash-injection yet.
