TV Licence crackdown in South Africa

President Cyril Ramaphosa is calling on all government departments with outstanding TV licence bills to urgently settle their debts with the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC).

National and provincial governments and municipalities owe nearly R35 million in unpaid TV licence fees.

Speaking to SABC News, Vincent Magwenya, spokesperson for The Presidency, said the government must enable the public broadcaster to fulfil its duties.

“The SABC is an important institution of our democracy. It needs all the funding that is required in order for it to fulfil its primary constitutional duty,” said Magwenya.

“Therefore, the President will certainly encourage and make a call to all departments that owe the SABC licence fees to immediately settle those fees with the SABC,” he added.

“We want to have an SABC that remains viable and continues to serve the public. Therefore, it is important that the government enables the SABC to fulfil its duties.”

He emphasised that Ramaphosa expects the National Treasury to follow up with the SABC and the departments that owe it money.

“We cannot have a situation where the SABC is owed by government,” added Magwenya.

This comes after Minister of Communications and Digital Technologies Solly Malatsi wrote to Deputy President Paul Mashatile asking for his assistance in bringing non-paying government departments into compliance.

“The culture of non-payment of public services such as TV licenses is unacceptable,” Malatsi said in a statement on Tuesday, 22 October 2024.

“Government, as a leader in our society, must set the high standard for compliance with legal and financial responsibilities.”

The minister said bringing government departments into compliance would significantly reduce the financial burden on the SABC.

“The SABC relies on the collection of TV license fees as one of its key revenue streams to fund its operations,” he said.

“Yet, collectively, national and provincial governments and municipalities owe the SABC over R30 million in outstanding TV license fees.”

The figure is closer to R35 million across 2,490 government department-owned TV sets that remain unpaid.

However, it should be noted that the government had reduced its TV licence bill compared to 2023, when it owed the public broadcaster R56 million.

TV licence non-compliance is a significant challenge for the SABC, with avoidance rates rising significantly between 2019 and 2024.

According to SABC chief financial officer Yolanda van Biljon, the public broadcaster only collected around R726 million of the R5 billion it billed in TV licence fees in 2023/24.

TV licence avoidance rates in the country from 2019 to 2024 were as follows:

• 2019 — 69%
• 2020 — 81%
• 2021 — 82%
• 2022 — 82%
• 2023 — 84%
• 2024 — 86%

New funding model urgently required

The SABC has been loss-making since the 2014/15 financial year, and despite its financial situation improving over the past year, the public broadcaster must rework its funding model to ensure its sustainability.

It reduced its losses before interest and tax in 2023/24 to R192 million from R827 million the year before.

The public broadcaster reported a loss of R1.13 million in 2022/23 when including interest and tax. It expects to report a loss after interest and tax of around R590 million for the 2023/24 financial year.

The SABC revealed its anticipated loss reduction during a presentation before Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Communications and Digital Technologies.

It congratulated the SABC on its improvements. However, it continued to call for changes to the public broadcaster’s funding model.

Committee chair Khusela Sangoni said she fully supports reworking the SABC’s funding model and requested that the public broadcaster submit alternatives for consideration.

“Give us something to work with. We’re in the process of looking at the bill to see if there are legislative requirements that need to be effected,” she said.

The bill to which she referred is the recently published draft SABC bill, which proposes that an alternative funding model framework only be finalised within three years of the legislation being passed.