TV licence problem for the SABC – MyBroadband

More South Africans avoid paying the South African Broadcasting Corporation’s (SABC) TV licence fees, but the SABC continues to pay lawyers and debt collectors to get holders to pay.

Moreover, the only chance of a change in the funding scheme for the public broadcaster will come within three years of the proposed SABC Bill being passed as it is written now. It is currently before Parliament.

The Broadcasting Act mandates that you pay for a TV licence. Failure to pay your TV licence fees will incur a 10% penalty per month up to a maximum of 100% per year.

The Broadcasting Act specifies that a court could impose a maximum penalty of R500 fine or up to six months in prison.

The payment avoidance rate reached 87% in 2023/24, meaning 13% of customers paid their TV licence fees during the financial year. The evasion rate has climbed from 69% in 2018/19.

This only accounts for people who previously bought a TV licence and later refused to renew it. Households who own a TV but never had a TV licence are excluded from the evasion rate.

By the end of 2023, the South African public owed the SABC R44 billion in unpaid TV licences.

As a result, the SABC is in deep financial trouble. It reported a loss of R1.13 billion in 2023/24 and anticipates a loss of R590 million at the end of the current financial year.

It also has a substantial debt with South Africa’s national signal distributor, Sentech.

If the SABC’s compliance rate were 40% or higher, the broadcaster would have been close to breaking even or making a profit.

Despite the clear collapse of the TV licence system, the public broadcaster still pays lawyers and debt collectors to try and convince people to pay outstanding fees, often through threatening and persistent SMSes.

However, employing debt collectors to send defaulting customers frequent SMSes doesn’t appear to work as avoidance rates continue to climb.

Moreover, the Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse (Outa) says South Africans shouldn’t fret if they have defaulted on their TV licence payments.

While the SABC could launch legal action against non-compliant TV licence holders, doing so through the courts would be challenging and costly.

The legal costs associated with the process would amount to several thousands of rands, making it a pointless exercise for the public broadcaster.

“It is just too small an amount to enter into legal challenges that may even backfire on them,” Outa CEO Wayne Duvenage previously told MyBroadband.

“Threats of prosecution are merely threats that I believe the public is aware that the SABC and the debt collectors will not be able to carry out.”

He added that this is why TV licence payment rates continue to drop.

Calls for more public funding

In a recent meeting of the Portfolio Committee for Communications and Digital Technologies, the committee said it supports greater public funding for the SABC to help it return to profitability.

In its presentation to the committee, the public broadcaster noted that its current budget reflects “an SABC in financial distress” despite its improvement from R1.13 billion to a R590 million loss.

The Portfolio Committee congratulated the public broadcaster on its significant progress in implementing its performance and turnaround strategy.

“The committee has noted a projection of reduced financial loss from R1.1 billion incurred in the 2023/24 financial year to R500 million by the end of the current financial year,” it said.

However, it is calling for changes to the public broadcaster’s funding model and called on the SABC and the Department of Communications and Digital Technologies to suggest funding options before ParliamParliamentnsideration.

However, South Africa’s communications minister, Solly Malatsi, recently told MyBroadband that he has some wild ideas for fixing the public broadcaster, which could offer an alternative.

He noted that government already has systems in place to collect outstanding money from citizens.

“For instance, you can’t renew your driver’s licence if you have outstanding fines and an enforcement order against you,” said Malatsi.

“If you’ve got multiple vehicles, you can’t renew the one without settling fines on the other, because those things are coordinated and integrated with eNatis.”

The minister said there could be opportunities to interlink the SABC TV licence to other licence fees to ensure its collection.

He emphasised that these were just ideas and not policy announcements.