The SABC that failed to respond to specific media enquiries earlier in the week about its upcoming 2019 South African election broadcast coverage on television, on Wednesday morning talked about it on its SABC2 and SABC News (DStv 404) channels and explained how it was forced to downsize on the scope of its election coverage this year compared to the past due to the broadcaster's financial problems.
Leanne Manas on Wednesday morning interviewed Phathiswa Magopeni, the SABC's head of news and current affairs, as well as Izak Minnaar, the SABC's head of digital news, from the SABC's set at its allocated berth at the Independent Electoral Commission's (IEC) Results Operations Centre in Pretoria.
The SABC was amongst other things asked for but never released any publicity images of the elections set or presenters for its planned coverage.
Phathiswa Magopeni admitted that the SABC that would run its previous South African election coverage fully from the IEC Results Centre in Pretoria wasn't able to do so in 2019.
"It's been tough. There are decisions that had to be made, and we had to think about how we navigate our coverage despite the fact that we constraints in terms of resources," she said.
"There are things that we can't do that we had done in the past," she said. "For instance, the SABC radio stations that we have here are 14 and it's only current affairs programming - which is long-form content, than having news being read from here and headlines being read from here."
"Because that would have included travel costs, accommodation costs and catering costs. So we've had to think hard about how we allocate our resources which are actually limited."
"This desk that we are using here (pictured), this desk is going to outlive the elections period, because it's going to one of our studios, which is Studio 12, so we had to think hard about how we're managing the resources that we have," said Phathiswa Magopeni.
She said "We're all aware of the financial constraints but we needed more ideas that the money for us to be able to deliver what we delivered. And credit to SABC News journalists - they were excellent in terms of coming up with ideas in how we covered our elections."
"We produced close to 200 programmes in terms of our outside broadcasts (OBs), joint TV and radio, and there are other programmes within our current affairs programming on television and radio that we carried and that reflected our election coverage."
Phathiswa Magopeni said "we did our best within the limited means that we had".
