by Thinus Ferreira
The struggling South African public broadcaster which will post yet another loss for its 2022/2023 financial year of over R1 billion abruptly lost 40% of its viewers across 5 provinces last year when the government suddenly switched off analogue transmitters - a process that the former SABC CEO Madoda Mxakwe says was "not done properly" and a process he slams as "just a mess".
The beleaguered SABC has seen ratings continue to slip for its SABC1, SABC2 and SABC3 TV channels - due to old content, repeats, Eskom's ongoing blackouts due to the country's electricity-generating capacity crisis, as well as the switch-off of Sentech's analogue signal transmitters.
South Africa's long-delayed process to switch from analogue to digital terrestrial television (DTT) continues to be dragged out due to incompetence, corruption and mismanagement by the South African government and its department of communications and digital technologies, as well as numerous court cases from industry players over the years.
In an interview with the City Press newspaper, the former SABC CEO Madoda Mxakwe, whose 5-year contract expired at the end of June, slammed the analogue switch-off which suddenly saw 5 provinces lose their SABC analogue signals, as "just a mess".
"It wasn't done properly. It was just a mess," he said.
While the former SABC board in 2022 - when the SABC still had one before a half-year gap that stretched well into 2023 - told the former minister of communications Khumbudzo Ntshaveni that a haphazard analogue switch-off will severely damage the public broadcaster and that it should be done responsibly, the opposite suddenly happened.
The department and Sentech rapidly switched off the SABC's analogue signals in 5 provinces: Limpopo, Mpumalanga, North West, the Free State and the Northern Cape.
With the switch-off 40% of the SABC's viewership in those provinces disappeared overnight. Now the government plans to switch off the SABC's analogue signals in Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal, the Eastern Cape and the Western Cape - South Africa's largest remaining provinces - by the end of December 2024.
"According to figures from the Broadcast Research Council of South Africa (BRCSA), after the switch-off in those 5 provinces, 40% of our audiences were completely wiped off last year, which did affect our revenue," Madoda Mxakwe said.
While 10.5 million people watched Uzalo on SABC1 in January 2022, that rating fell to 4.8 million after the analogue switch-off of Sentech transmitters.
"If a client had been paying us R200 million a year for advertising space, they began asking why they should pay the same amount when the viewership had been reduced from 10.5 million to 4.8 million," Madoda Mzakwe said.
