by Thinus Ferreira
South Africa's beleaguered public broadcaster on Wednesday for the first time confirmed its massive loss-making projection from earlier this year and announced that it had made another annual loss of R.1 billion for its 2022/2023 financial year, saying that it is in such a dire financial situation that it's even struggling to pay "critical expenditure" that's crucial to keeping the SABC on-air.
The broadcaster's top execs earlier this year told parliament that it expected the struggling SABC to post another annual loss which would exceed R1 billion.
In the latest briefing to parliament on the SABC's fourth quarter expenditure and financial reports, the public broadcaster's board and top executives on Tuesday confirmed that the broadcaster posted a loss of R1.1 billion for its 2022/2023 financial year.
The SABC previously told parliament that it would be breaking even for the 2022/2023 financial year.
The SABC is for instance once again severely struggling to pay suppliers and production companies for content, with Danie Odendaal Productions that halted production on Monday due to non-payment and which will only resume filming from Thursday after the SABC managed to scrape together some money to settle some of the massive amount of money owed to this production company.
Khathutshelo Ramakumba, SABC board chairperson, told parliament that the broadcaster blames "contributing factors" like Eskom's loadshedding, the aggressive competition from video streaming services like Netflix and Disney+, plunging SABC TV ratings affecting advertising rates, and the loss of TV households receiving the SABC signals through analogue transmission towers being switched off by government, for the loss.
"Loadshedding affect the audiences of the SABC and therefore the advertising revenues that goes hand in hand with that," he said.
"There's also the implication of the analogue switch-off on the audiences of the SABC but also the tough competition that is there largely on the video entertainment side of things with subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) in the form of multinational companies entering this space with limited or no regulation at all."
"The current funding model of the SABC is simply not working and it's not working for the future," Khathutshelo Ramakumba said.
He noted the "high SABC TV Licence fee evasion rate which is somewhere on the upwards of 87%".
"This explains the loss position where the SABC is."
Khathutshelo Ramakumba said that "at the moment the ailing revenues that we are making from the commercial side of the business are used to cross-subsidise the public service mandate and that is not sustainable and the loss position proves the answer of the unsustainability of this current funding model."
He said that the "SABC is in a situation, where now - as a short-term intervention - we're even deferring certain critical expenditure programmes that are critical to keep the SABC on-air".
SABC+ performance disappointing
Nada Wotshela, acting SABC CEO, said that its SABC+video streaming platform's performance "is not quite what we had expected".
"This platform was not built specifically for the SABC. It's a platform we acquired from a third party".
She said SABC+ which the SABC took over from Telkom "hasn't grown how we anticipated. One of the issues is the cost of data in South Africa".
