Treasury awards SABC R1bn bailout

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DA says its not the right thing to do.

The fact that the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) has been awarded a R1-billion bailout by the National Treasury shows that the minister's probably unconstitutional attempt to introduce a money bill that would have funded the SABC via a new 1% tax was nothing more than an attempt to pressure the Treasury into granting them a major funding windfall.

Back on November 4, I mooted that this may have been the reason for the strange decision of the communications minister to attempt to introduce a money bill, after the SABC was designated R200m in the medium term budget, and it appears that the Treasury duly buckled under the pressure.

The granting of yet another bailout to a state-owned entity brings the total spent on these sorts of bailouts over the last four years to R243-billion.

This is an enormous sum of money, that could have made sizeable inroads into the service delivery backlogs in this country. Instead, it has been spent on propping up badly run, chronically inefficient state owned entities, that have largely become playgrounds for ANC cadres rather than proper providers of services to the South African people.

Like many of the other state-owned entities, the SABC's almost R1-billion losses were largely as a result of internal financial mismanagement and mass fruitless and wasteful spending. They have become a black hole for public money that should be going to service delivery. The public should not have to pay for this. Those responsible must be brought to book.

Together with the ongoing crises at Eskom, South African Airways and an array of other public enterprises, the SABC's meltdown is clearly indicative of the ANC government's complete and utter failure to hold responsible for their actions those guilty of running parastatals into the ground.