SABC not in the business of profit - Motsoeneng

The broadcaster was vague, however, on the probe's terms of reference. "The firm will look at our policies and advise if they are still able to relate with the business's current operations," said chief financial officer James Aguma on Wednesday, at a media conference to present the public broadcaster's results.

The SABC reported a R395m loss for the year ended March, which it blamed on the country's struggling economy and television licence defaulters. Last year it made a profit of R358m. However, it has downplayed the significance of its poor financial performance, saying profitability is not necessarily its mandate.

"We're not in the business of profit," said chief operating officer Hlaudi Motsoeneng. The most important concern for the SABC was to fulfil its mandate of broadcasting for the entire nation, he said.

The results were overshadowed by the disclosure that Motsoeneng's salary had risen from R2.8m to R3.7m in the last financial year.

The Democratic Alliance asked for Motsoeneng to be summoned before the communications portfolio committee for lying when he reportedly told a parliamentary committee in April that the SABC was financially sustainable.

In addition to the loss at the SABC, the auditor-general has cited "irregular expenditure", much of it due to the absence of any documentation being provided for audit, said the auditorgeneral's report on the public broadcaster's accounts.

The auditor-general said in the year ended March, R23.9m had been unaccounted for because supporting documents to test compliance against the broadcaster's supply chain management regulations were unavailable.

It was satisfied that documents had been provided to support R272m in expenditure that had been deemed "irregular, fruitless and wasteful" over the years, although it had questions about their contents.

Aguma said the SekelaXabiso probe should enable the company to obtain a clean audit for the year to March next year.

At the same time, the organisation would change its policies to conform to the current operating environment, said Motsoeneng.

"Many of these issues raised as wasteful are merely due to outdated business policies," he said. An example was the all-day news channel the SABC now broadcasts on one of DStv's pay television channels.

"We don't want to give people the impression that we will be persecuting or investigating them," said Motsoeneng, adding that "we have to align policy to operations".

Source: Business Day