The South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), ruined by years of financial mismanagement, excessive spending and management structure failure, has embarked on a cost-cutting exercise. Its latest decision includes the closing of five foreign news bureaux and scaling down of news operations in several countries. We are closing down five of our international news bureaux in Beijing (China), Dakar (Senegal), Brussels (Belgium), Sao Paulo (Brazil) and one of the two offices in New York (USA), Prof Phil Mtimkulu, Interim SABC Board Chairperson told a press briefing on 4 September 2009. He said SABC is scaling down its news operations in other international countries, actively keeping South Africa correspondents in London and the United Nations in New York, but locally based journalists would be contracted from Kenya and Nigeria to file reports from those countries.
Launched almost two years ago by the former news boss Snuki Zikalala, the 13 international news bureaux were given the mandate to put the SABC at the apex of Africas news leaders. However, while news staff worked hard sometimes under difficult conditions to cover international news from an African perspective’, the cost to maintain these offices proved too much to bear, pushing the international news division to constantly overspend its budget.
The SABC said that the approved budget for this financial year is just under R37 million and that leaving them open would have led to the network spending R60 million, but closing the news bureaux would mean R7 million will be saved.
News staff working in these bureaux have been told they will not lose their jobs, but instead either recalled to SA or redeployed’ to the remaining bureaux. The need to ensure that SA voice tells compelling international news prompted the launch of these bureaux, but we realised later that strategy and budget didn’t match, that is why we made this decision, confirmed interim board member Libby Lloyd.
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