Disturbing News

There’s a lot of it about these days.  Disturbing news that is.  Today’s is a real economic howler.  The SABC wants an additional tax to fix its disastrous financial position.  For those who don’t know, the national propaganda machine… sorry, I mean national broadcaster, is pretty much belly-up.  That’s what happens when you have uninspiring programming, financial mismanagement, reporters stationed in far-flung countries costing a fortune to keep there but adding little value, and dwindling add revenues.

Apparently funds from TV licences are not sufficient and are cumbersome to collect, whereas a 1% additional tax on incomes would supposedly provide more than double the revenue earned from TV licences and be collected more efficiently through the South African Revenue Service (SARS).  So the SABC wants to scrap TV licences (yay!), but replace them with a 1% tax (boo!). 

Now some might say this is better because TV licences are admittedly the most cumbersome and annoying fees we have to pay.  Why not just tax it directly off your income? 

Well, if you earn R300-500k a year, you would be shifting R2000-4000 every year toward state-TV coffers.  That’s paying not much less for 3 lousy channels than you pay for satellite TV every year with multiple exciting channels.  Furthermore a TV licence at present only costs about R250/year.

But these are utilitarian arguments.  The real problem is funding a state-broadcaster in the first place, no matter how you choose to do it.  Fin24.com reports Minister of Communications, Siphiwe Nyanda as saying that

“The department will introduce an appropriate funding model to ensure the public broadcaster is not left to the vagaries of the markets,” … “The amendment will ensure that the public broadcaster is best suited to our young democracy”

The ANC simply picked up where the Nats left off in 1994.  They have figured that running a broadcaster is a great way to control public opinion and impose and promote state goals.  It is an absolute affront to our liberty that South Africans should be forced to fund the SABC.

If a party wants to run a channel it should do so from a purely market based perspective.  If the ANC wants to peddle its views, why not fund it out of party donations or from ad revenues?

This goes back to my comment on Friday that government refuses to experience a recession.  The constitution should ban the government/SABC from forcing people to fund it and should get funding like any private broadcaster: from ad revenues and from subscription fees.  SABC should be shaving off costs wherever it can, cutting staff, and outsourcing offshore news to foreign bureaus to be profitable.  The profit imperitive would return to SABC if public funding was totally cut off and it would actually become a better broadcasting service for it.

That we have to fund a sclerotic organisation such as the SABC is an affront to our liberty as South Africans.  That our incomes might be taxed for such funding without us having any choice in the matter is tyranny.